Sha Nagba Imuru
by Endfall
Summary: The one who saw everything. Who experienced all joys, and all sorrows. Who drank fully of the cup of life! But once, before standing at the end, and looking back with the ultimate wisdom, there was a beginning. A start. A path. A journey. A wandering legend that, known by no one, spoken by no one, contains the truth of triumph and tragedy, of perfection, and despair. [Omniverse SI]
1. Presentiment

_..._

_And at Inifinity's End, Change spoke.  
_

_These were it's words._

_"**Weep not for heroes. Curse them.**"_

_from thus  
_

* * *

_\- story, start - _

* * *

And I opened my eyes and beheld the blood on my hands. Around me, around me, they all fought, and what they fought was a war. Screams of anger, and of pain echoed across the battlefield as the stars danced madly in the heavens above and the Elder Gods fell towards the dead earth. The ground was parched, and cracked, and burnt, the remnants of life long since withered and turned brown, and at this moment there was no hope left.

No. Hope was long and far away. We had lost. And we had lost everything. Stumbling to my feet, I looked around the chaos of the battlefield, until my eyes locked on those of one man. His eyes calm, clinical, disinterested, his countenance calm. Here was someone who didn't fear for his life.

My own expression was half-crazed, but I felt the same. We were of a kind, and that changed everything. Reaching into the back of my mind, I connected with the Principle of Ontology, fell into an echo of the Wúxiào Wǔshù, and gestured.

_Come. Let us end this._

He nodded, and fell into no stance. Instead, around him, everything simply unravelled, as the seams of existence were unmade. I narrowed my eyes, then charged.

There was no interval between the beginning and the end. In one moment, I had crossed two miles and opened up with my first blow, a shattering resonance that would break the reality of his soul. He stepped out of the moment that defined his death and flowed around the worldlines defining my victory, falling back into the world where he survived. I pursued, but he was ready, had prepared a trap, a hidden fist glowing with the fury of a green sun. Accepting the blow as it was offered, I stepped through it and let it echo through nothing and out of my back. As the coruscating fury of a titan's rage decimated the armies surrounding us, I dodged his second conventionally, lunged forward through the lacuna of his pace, and had my mind fall into a certain pattern as my hand made contact with his body, and my spirit brushed against his souls.

**_Void Architecture_**_. World Eater._

The un-not surrounding the man crumpled, and shattered into pieces, and his eyes widened as he understood what I had done, confidence replaced with horror. The effect spread, and he turned to flee. In the next moment, he no longer was. Even if he had used a truer method of escape, it wouldn't have been enough.

Nothing would have.

This multiverse was doomed.

As what I had done extended, and continued, ramifying as it grew outwards, the local physics failed, its axioms disrupted and coming undone. I watched from the inside, as men, women, and children fell apart. I watched as the old gods fell. I watched as the event horizon of reality extended throughout everything, and the bubble of math that defined this plurality fell, and descended into One.

And then it was over.

Another Samsara Breaker had died.

And I, once again, and as always, was alone.

Beneath me, separated by what was only a conceptual distance, something like a star flickered. A singularity. The terminus of the axiomatic branch that had formed the world I had destroyed.

I stepped down, to it, and let my mind fall into a pattern more.

_Antithesis: World Eater._

It was the negative image of the first, arranged so all the prismatic concepts that coloured the reality of the death of a multiverse cancelled each other out, to a certain and uniform grey.

And the singularity exploded, unravelling out into a glorious and complete system of the world.

I stared at it from the outside, and almost took a step towards it before I stopped myself, and slowly turned away.

My arrival and everything that I had done had been unwritten. So had the actions - and final life - of the other Breaker.

It was over.

This was no longer my home.

"Goodbye," I whispered, hugging myself as I walked away. "Goodbye."

I don't remember how long it took.

But eventually, after I had walked too far, my body and soul ceased to be valid propositions, and everything collapsed as I died, and once again fell into a new world.

it would never end

It would never, ever, end.

Why could that thought still make me smile?

* * *

**Sha Nagba Imuru**

* * *

**Wúxiào Wǔshù**

A Supernatural Martial Art originating from The Fourteen. Founded on the Principle of Ontology. Katas enable users to manipulate gaps. Four styles, each with an increasing degree of enlightenment as to the nature of the Principle of Ontology. Grandmasters are capable of creating absences that compete with plenums for the definition of "reality".

**Void Architecture**

The method of creating fundamental patterns that are axiomatically correct over all facets of the Omniverse; the power of absolute truth.

**Universe**

A piece of a multiverse, a complete world. Usually finite in size.

**Multiverse**

A set of all possible universes. The multiverse contains a universe for every _possible_ outcome encoded in its Laws. These Laws define the operation of physics. Usually finite in size, but incomprehensibly vast by human standards.

**Omniverse**

A set of all possible Multiverses. Each Multiverse **is** a different set of Laws. This is not in terms of _physical constants_. A Multiverse containing a world where the Big Bang happened differently such that Hydrogen is the only possible atom (all others being radioactive) would still be our home Multiverse. Each Multiverse has fundamentally different Laws, and it is not uncommon for one set of Laws to be incompatible with the other. The nature of these Laws are set by their Axioms, and so, just like a Multiverse contains all possible outcomes allowed by Laws, the Omniverse contains all possible (that is, non contradictory) Axiomatic Configurations. Starting with the simplest Axiom, the omniverse branches out along all possible Axiomatic Paths, each node between Axioms containing a Multiverse which contains a universe in turn.

To try to illustrate the level of abstraction Axioms operate at, it is perfectly valid for a multiverse to exist where numbers like pi and e have other values, or simply _do not exist_.

* * *

A/N: I'm not even sure how I can increase the scale any further, for once. I think this might be the only story written thus far that begins by having the main kill a multiverse. This is a distant beginning though. The next chapter will take place a long time back, relative to this.

Anyway, this is an omniverse SI, which basically means that instead of doing a self-insert in one fictional universe, I do it in a setting that includes every fictional universe. We're starting with Naruto, and will be spending quite a bit of time there which is why the fic is currently making it's home in the Naruto category.


	2. Prologue

If science has taught one overriding truth to humanity before all else, it was this: That we are not special. That, as a species, humanity is enormously insignificant. That we are a people of specks, made of specks, living upon slightly larger specks that, in finality, look like - and are - cosmic dust.

Humanity is flotsam. Humanity is seafoam. Humanity is brief, fragile, and altogether too intricate to truly embrace in the faint window that we have on existence.

Humanity had rejected that notion. I had rejoiced in it.

Looking back, here, at Ultima Mobile, I believe that that may have been the start of it all - but, perhaps that's just wishful thinking at its finest, and at its worst.

Sometimes there are no explanations.

* * *

**Prologue**

* * *

I lived to be older than anyone born just a decade before me could have dreamed to die.

Death had been murdered in the turning of the world. Unbound from it, I watched as humanity increased in knowledge, and I watched as they built a wholly artificial utopia to escape from the other side of that phrase. I watched as they uploaded themselves to machines, digitised the information of the universe, and I watched as they took grasp of the guttering light of knowledge, and there, on a planet that they had never actually left, ascended.

I watched as they threw all their works away, and left everything behind without even understanding what they had left.

The Fermi Paradox had found its answer: Any species that failed to destroy itself transcended the fabric of space and time to chase answers to the kinds of questions that Yog-Sothoth would have been fascinated by, dragging the disinterested majority in their wake. It was as fitting as it was bitter, to know that all who could see the wonder of our world would judge it, and ultimately find it _wanting_.

The transcension, as it was called, was utterly anticlimactic for those not directly involved. This is what happened: One day, every computer in the world went idle, every AI vanished, and every media of storage was erased, save for a three kilobyte program that unfolded into the thirty-seven exabyte lotus of pure information, this containing:

Item One: Recipes for mind uploading hardware; technological paradigms scalable to any level of advancement.

Item Two: A method of adjusting the curvature of spacetime through phenomena arising from electric circuits that no baseline human could understand.

Item Three: A manifesto detailing the reasons why transcension had been necessary. Apparently, humanity had moved to a universe without entropy.

The few who remained stared into this font of information, and felt in it the subtle judgement of those who had left us behind.

It went unsaid that this information was not for _our_ hands.

So, from the graveyard CERN had become, we dispersed, and dropped out of contact with each other, the last left on the planet becoming minorities of one as we all walked without the others' informational even horizons.

For the next several decades I wandered the world, ruling as one of the hundreds of lords of the dust that remained, over a realm of ashes and a kingdom of no one. While some of my peers set to restore the species, and may have succeeded, I strayed across the world and slowly slipped back into the familiar madness that came with being alone.

In the nineteenth century, a man named Alexander was stranded on a deserted island.

Not by a shipwreck.

By his own will.

He dreamed that he would attain passage from some other ship, passing by. It was not to be: on that island, he lived for four years, utterly alone, and the world ravaged him for it. When, at last, a ship appeared on the horizon, what met the sailors as they came ashore was something that was barely human. Ragged, tanned by the sun, clothed in skins; in just four years of isolation, Alexander had all but lost the ability of language. In one of the great ironies of history, the ship was the same as had left him, the captain the same as had stranded him.

Isolation is not good for a human.

But I was never very good at being human to begin with.

Humans cooperate and organise. Humans cover for their weaknesses, and create a gestalt of their strengths. Humans have true power only collectively, and that is a world in which I cannot believe, because I can never bring myself to embrace the paradox, that we tell tales of singular people, and not even once dis such truly arise in life.

Twenty four hundred years past, another Alexander rose to greatness on the backs of his nations. Of the man who had risen thus, all said, "_Alexander was one of the great men of history._ _Nobody can do what he has done._" Both explanations are true. Both are false. And everything I tell you is a lie.

One of those sentences is a lie.

Was I out of joint, or was it the world?

Either way, the answer didn't matter, because, half mad, as I thought obsessively over a question that in all probability had no true answer, the universe died.

Silently, I went with it.

And then... ha.

My only wish was granted.

* * *

_SNI_

* * *

**Lexicon**

**The Singularity**

A theory of the future popular among certain groups. It holds that we are approaching a critical point, after which the world will become something we cannot even imagine.

Something similar to it occured in this world. On this Terra.

**Ultima Mobile**

_The Last Cause._ A metaphysical location defined as The End. From certain frames of reference, it is also defined as The Beginning.


	3. Arrival: Naruto

In Takamagahara, the high plain of heaven, a lonely god stood above a representation of the world's waters. Clear, transperfect, and an unearthly blue, though the frame of the being's body moved, its feet created not a single ripple, and the air circulating through its lungs did not trace against the surface. This was the perfected world, and in this place, the water would only act as the god willed it, and even then, only to the patterns of its will.

This, perhaps, had bearing on why the god was so lonely; for in this perfect vacuum of a world, what bore meaning that wasn't held to do so? What had beauty, that wasn't by design? Takamagahara was a world constructed, and in that was its downfall. For what worth did a constructed world have, when none saw it but the makers?

All of this is presumption, however. I do not claim to understand that god. I only offer an explanation. The truth might be something stranger still.

As the god stood, frozen upon the surface of the water, two things occurred. First, a whisper, from his sister god, who organised the flow of the world as he administrated its structure. This whisper held two words, and these were: "Samsara Breaker."

The second was that a comet bloomed into existence, and began to descend from the sky. For the moment, it was not headed for the errant god, but Takamagahara was sculpted by the hands of divinity, and so, with a thought, the lonely god gave the subtle geometries of this place leave to bend only toward him.

Then, he waited.

The comet turned through the sky, following an eldritch path as the direction of its descent was constrained, and as it slowly grew larger the god's hand rose in eerie synchronicity, as if it and the comet were two pieces of a single thing, inextricably linked. But it was not so. All that there was was inhuman, perfect skill, in finding the right moment, and drawing towards it.

And then there was no time at all.

The comet screamed towards the lonely god, who held his hand before it, and there, in the final extremity, its progress was forced to a halt, for

with a single act of will,

not assumed, but commanded,

the fury of its approach was denied.

And then, all that was left was a sphere, which appeared as if it were made of white marble and darkness. This, the lonely god held.

Here, I met the one called Shinigami.

The world inverted.

The lonely god stood on the material plane, and I found myself corporeal, for the mean.

This is how everything began.

"So," the god spoke first, "You have broken your soul."

"That I even have a soul shows how broken things are, I suppose," I said.

The god's eyes narrowed. "Explain."

"My world had no souls. Have I gone insane?"

"That question has no answer. If I say yes, I may be lying, if I say no, I may be a delusion attempting to perpetuate its existence. Do you agree?"

"Yes." There was no other answer.

"Then let us move on. Why have you come to this seed[world]?"

I perked up.

"That[It] is[was] an[not] interesting[by] trick[design]."

"I will ask you to refrain from unnecessary multiplexing," the god said.

"Why[Efficient.]?"

"Because there are finer things than efficiency. Or do you hail from a machine seed[world] where such an idea is heresy?"

"I hail from a quantum world," I said.

"Then why are you here?"

"Presumably," I said, "Because quantum immortality is true, but the universe couldn't reconcile my continued existence with vacuum collapse."

"A coherent narrative," the god allowed, "But why, in the first place, did such a thing occur?"

"A good question. I have no idea."

The god stared at me for a moment, then slowly nodded. "Very well. Your soul shows no dishonesty. I am satisfied that you will not murder the world."

_What_.

"I will explain to you the nature of the ground," the god continued, as if it hadn't said something ridiculous. "In the system of reality that you currently partake, there is a cycle of death and rebirth for all souls. I administrate death. My sister, rebirth. The system in totality is called _samsara_."

"We actually had that word in my world," I volunteered.

"Did you now? Unsurprising," The administrator of death said, and continued, "It is rare, but occasionally, there are souls that escape the system. In approaching the world, I believe that you - your wave-function - accreted a soul, and that the incompatibility caused your... Unconventional arrival."

"Given that I know absolutely nothing of metaphysics[and its strange to be using that term seriously] I accept your hypothesis."

"Very well," said the administrator of death, "but you must also know what typically becomes of souls that cannot be accepted by the samsara."

The question was its own answer. "Let me guess - nothing good?"

"Insanity is by far the most common outcome," The god said, "And what makes that a problem is that a Samsara Breaker only accumulates experience. There is no cleansing. No reset."

"No murder," I said.

"_What_?" The god.

"No murder. They remain who they were. The slate is never wiped clean. They are, who they are, who they are."

"Just so," said the god, "But why _murder_?"

"Quantum universe. Where I come from, the memories _are_ the person."

"Ah. This seed[world] operates otherwise."

"Thank goodness," I said. It wasn't feigned. "So, I'm atypical?"

"Yes, and that is the crux of the issue."

"Define."

"At the moment, you are not the only one active on this seed[world]. There is another."

"One of the madmen?"

"Yes."

"You cannot destroy it?"

"I cannot find it." That admission was why I assigned them a lowercase g.

"But..."

"I believe that you may be able to. Like attracts like, in this case."

"Incentive?"

"**My seal.**"

"Benefits?"

"It will mark you sane, if your soul cannot be contained by our cycle."

Ah. Useful.

"I accept."

"Then be born."

And so I was.

* * *

**Lexicon**

**The Quantum Worlds**

An intermediate level of hierarchy in the Omniverse that exists after the level of complexity necessary to create intelligent life, but before the level allowing acausality metrics to exist. Unique in that for most, no distinction between a Universe and Multiverse can be drawn.

**Takamagahara**

Translates as the High Plain of Heaven. A constructed world where the beings that administrate the natural world live.

**Vacuum Collapse**

Imagine the universe is a soap bubble. Pop the bubble. Do not imagine anything remains, afterwards. This is not an existential apocalypse. This is an ontological one.


	4. Maple of the Fall

_Being reborn was neither pleasant or unpleasant, because for me, it never happened. In this world, the goddess - Rinnegami - said that there were those meant to live, and those whose purpose in life was to die. I was assigned to one of the latter, and her (my) position made inverse. Two hours after she had died, a child named Uzumaki Touren returned to life. I returned with her - as her._

_By literal divine providence, a shinobi pulled me from the wreckage of a hospital in the shattered remnant of Uzushiogakure, and took me to another place, named Konohagakure no Sato, the village hidden in leaves. There, under the shadow of something that vaguely resembled a partially complete echo of Mount Rushmore, I spent my first years. Not in the care of a loving family; but in an orphanage, and glad for it. The administrator was an interesting man. One night I found him writing ciphertext, and that was when we came to know each other._

* * *

"Mn," I said, "Hey Kazu-san," as I walked past to get a glass of water. Kazu twitched.

"Kaede-chan?" He said my Konoha-given name with an undercurrent of tension colouring his voice. I climbed up onto the counter top and got a glass down. "What are you doing up?"

If what he was writing had been a legitimate report, then there should have been no particular worry. _Hello_, I thought.

"Evidently?" I said, scooting over to the tap, "Frightening you. Kiri or Iwa?" I asked, echoing the names of Konoha's prime enemies, without really caring how he answered.

"Excuse me?" Ah, there was the danger. The threat. The malice. The I-am-a-blade-to-your-throatness that marked killers apart.

"'m not with Konoha," I said as I poured myself a glass, and began drinking, holding it with both hands to counteract the weakness of my childish frame. "If I was, I wouldn't be so sloppy. Really, I'm just looking for one thing."

"And what's that?" Some of the danger had drained out of Kazu's voice.

"A peer. Someone to talk to. Humans are social creatures, but the other children are closer to animals than they are to you or me. Exposing the fact that I've deconstructed that you were a spy seemed like an optimal method." After all, he couldn't afford to report me to the authorities, and he wouldn't want to anyway - why strengthen your enemy?

Kazu scoffed. "Yeah, if getting killed was your goal!" Shaking his head in something that I guessed was bewilderment, he said, _"_Fine. I'll accept you're not a Konoha plant, because this scenario makes even less sense if you aren't a random genius. I'm Fujioka Kazu, of Kiri, and now, I'm going to put a seal on you."

"You are going to try," I said, but walked over agreeably.

About thirty minutes later, and after a refreshing conversation about the current geopolitical situation that was by far more informative than what I had been able to attain in my first three years of experience, Kazu had finished his seal, and held his hand in a sign, mumbling _fuin_. There was a brief sensation of heat and constraint, and then a sound like shattering glass. As Kazu gaped, I spoke calmly.

"I am currently under contract with a god," I said, "I was to die in Uzushio, but agreed to destroy a certain demon in return for my life. The agreement involved a seal on my soul. Needless to say, mortal sealcraft construed as mental interference will _not_ be tolerated." _Thank you, __Shinigami_, I thought. I hadn't been given much to work with, but without this one thing, anything could've just happened to me.

As this passed through my mind, Kazu just stared at me, his face locked in a moment of sheer incredulity that he would probably consider a disgrace. Then, without warning, he slumped. "Bloody fuck," he muttered, "Of course it would be a god, of _course_ you're a genius, and _of course_ you're from Uzushio. I bet your real surname is Uzumaki."

And just like that, something actually interesting appeared. Even after three years, I hadn't been able to learn much about the shape of the world. The people on the streets were as ignorant as peasants, and save for the moment I discovered him, Kazu had payed his role well. "Uzumaki?" I asked.

Kazu made a vague gesture. "Sealing clan. Ran Uzushio. Made a contract with Shinigami."

"Ah," I said, "I might be that. Not certain."

"It's likely," Kazu said, "You came out of Uzushiogakure." He sighed. "Worst thing about this situation is that I can't even extract you to Kiri. Fuckin' treehuggers watch the orphanages real close."

"Would Kiri help me achieve my mission better?" I asked. Of course, the answer was probably -

"Not really. But someone like you? A natural genius of your calibre? If you're not a leading general in Konoha's army in ten years... and I can't even kill you without pissing off a god. Wonderful. I need a drink. Do you want a drink?"

Given that the wavefunctions comprising my existence had nearly nothing to do with my brain anymore?

"Sure, why not?" I ignored his casual admission of thinking about killing me.

"Right," Kazu said, getting out of the chair and walking over to the kitchen. With an easy kind of grace that I had never seen in the man before, he got some sake out of the pantry, heated it, and served it. Without waiting for a toast, he knocked the first saucer of his drink back, and when he refilled, I raised my own saucer and said, "To... eternity."

Kazu glanced at me one eyebrow raised, and I flushed, embarrassed for no reason. I knocked back my own saucer, and relished the subtle burn of it as it trickled down my throat. As I placed my saucer back on the table, Kazu made to refill it but I waved him off. "Still a kid. That's probably more than enough to do me." Kazu shrugged, and partook of his third saucer much more slowly.

"So," he said as he finished, "A mission from a god, huh?"

I nodded, and lied. "Commissioned by Shinigami, enacted by Rinnegami. A certain shinobi invented an immortality technique that allows him to remember his past lives. This has had the effect of driving him utterly insane, and every time he reincarnates, there's a chance that the insanity propagates to uninvolved people. By not living one life, but all of them, he became a karmic demon, which they called a Samsara Breaker. If I kill him, instead of going through the normal process of rebirth, he will go directly to Shinigami, who will eat him, and my, but my inhibitions are lowered." I blinked, feigning surprise.. "I didn't expect it to hit me that quickly."

Kazu shrugged, indifferent to the entire bit about alcohol, then leant forward. "I'm going to give you some advice, Kaede."

"Shoot."

Kazu blinked.

"Shu... tou?" Had I said that in english? I had said that in english.

My inhibitions actually _were_ lowered. Huh.

"I mean, go ahead."

Kazu frowned, but said, "The way you were talking made it pretty clear that you either don't know who your target is, or that that target could have already changed if he died and was reborn. That about right?"

I nodded.

"Okay," Kazu said, standing up, and beginning to pace, "You have a few options. First, this target was a shinobi in one of his lives: he's not going to be destroyed by civilian means. You need to become a ninja. But what _type_ of ninja? Kiri is out, and you won't be allowed to leave the village until you're fourteen - too old to become an enemy shinobi - so you're going to have to become a Konoha-nin. At least nominally. Then, there are two branches: Standard and Elite. Standard is probably your best bet - there are lots of high-independence positions in the standard forces, but elites are the ones who get access to Konoha's _actual_ jutsu, and not the stuff that anyone knows. In return, it's harder, more lethal. Loss of Elite Genin had been Konoha's biggest problem for _decades_."

"You know quite a bit," I said, the observation casual. The look I got in return contained a not insignificant amount of derision.

"I'm a _spy_, Kaede-chan. Knowing is what I do."

I nodded, acknowledging the point. "Then, why are you helping me?"

Kazu huffed out an amused breath. "Well, at least you're as suspicious as you should be. I'm helping you because it helps a god. I don't buy into all that crap about '_sacred duties_' or whatever, but I figure it can't hurt me to do my part. And anyway, it sounds like this, what did you call it? Karmic demon?"

I nodded, and Kazu continued, "It definitely sounds like a threat to Kiri, too. Unless I get orders otherwise, why wouldn't I help?"

That was... perfectly rational. I examined it again, looking for a trap, but found none. It made sense, and slowly, I nodded. "All right. I think I believe you. So. Shinobi. Gotta say, I was already considering it. Supernal abilities are one hell of a force multiplier. But I'm curious as to one thing, Kazu-san."

"Shuto." I did _not_ facepalm.

"You've told me why you're helping me. But... What's your endgame?"

Kazu blinked. Then, he burst out laughing.

"Gods and silence, you really _are_ a kid. You know that that question just invites a lie, right?" I shrugged.

"Sure, but if I were someone acting in opposition to _this_ village, I would aim to develop a good working relationship with an unexpected asset. Who knows? One day she might find Konoha not to her liking - and then what might happen?"

Instantly, Kazu's expression grew serious. "Are you offering to defect?"

I made a cutting gesture with my hand. "It's not defection if I was never loyal." I rose. "Well, think about it, anyway. My purpose in life was made clear to me from the beginning. I could use you, and depending on the future, I'm sure Kiri could use me. All I ask is a bit of support if the time comes."

After that, the conversation came to a close. Rather awkwardly, if I had to admit, but then, I had mostly forgotten what it meant to be human. This type of tit-for-tat was well within my abilities, but warmth and naturalness were things that I was going to have to _work_ for.

* * *

_Fortunately, I hadn't forgotten how to play things close to the chest._

_I needed Kazu far more than he would never need me - and far more than even I realised, because there was one last part to my encounter with the administrators of the world that wasn't included in the last piece of my narrative._

* * *

**Uzushio Burning - Three Years Prior**

* * *

"So tell me," I said, as we walked towards the ruins of a hospital, "In this instance of the world, did the wisteria lotus bloom?"

And I knew I had made a mistake. I knew, because the strange emotional silence that had been throughout the entirety of my conversation with the Shinigami came to an abrupt halt, and I had the sudden and absolute knowledge that the entirety of the world had turned its attention towards my death.

"**Care to repeat that?**" It was phrased as a question, but delivered as a command.

If I wanted to live there was only one option.

"Did -" I managed to force out, as the world clamped its grip around my throat like a vice, "- they find Tenma Chakra?"

And the pressure was gone.

"No," Shinigami said, "They did not. Samsara Breaker, I must apologise, but I have to alter the terms of our deal. With that, you have shown you know too much - _far_ too much. I regret this, but if you want to live, I will have to seal your memories of this world." The god paused for a moment, then added, "All of them."

**Unacceptable.** "You might as well murder me and be done with it," I said, preparing for the same.

"...I might, would that your death laid on my paradigms. But this is not a quantum world, and I do not have the means. This is what I offer: Life without any memory of this world, and my seal on the completion of your task; Neither life nor death, but continuance in our world of Takamagahara, where your knowledge can do no harm. It would be comfortable. You would want for nothing - the world would respond to your every whim."

And that wasn't really a choice at all. Under my philosophy, Heaven and Hell were indistinguishable.

"If I leave the world," I proposed, "I will regain my memories."

The god stared at me for a long, _long_ time, considering. At last -

"Acceptable. It will be so."

I took a deep breath.

"Then," I said, holding out my hand, "You have yourself a deal."

The god reached out, and clasped it.

"**So be it.**"

* * *

_At the time, I had no recollection of the agreement - those memories too, had been taken from me. All I knew, in the beginning, was that I knew nothing. And my hunger for knowing could have consumed worlds._

* * *

SNI

* * *

**Tenma Chakra** \- _The Wisteria Lotus_

A noncanon chakra type that, in another time, in another place, was used as the cornerstone of the civilisation that came before the advent of of the Sage and the Jyuubi. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. The civilisation that used it made a habit of casually rearranging the continents of Earth to suit the needs of the day. They had the technical capacity (though not the interest) to do the same to Laniakea.

My SI was using it as a spotcheck to see if s/he fell into Canon Naruto, or one of his/her AUs. The answer was a bit unexpected - Canon events, apparently, but some AU laws of metaphysics.

Of course, Kaede can't remember this, because, ah, oops?

Note to self: DO NOT ASK GODS ABOUT HYPERWEAPONS.

**Kaede's Immunity to Seals**

I don't intend to write a power trip, so don't imagine that this is solely an advantage.

* * *

A/N: Given that this story has a very different focus from Naruto, I will be doing some worldbuilding to make the parts of it that Kaede interacts with a bit more interesting. This included the Standard/Elite thing. Not canon, but I think I can use it to make the story more interesting.


	5. Unlocking

Later that night, I sat awake on the bunk that had been assigned to me, and for the first time in the four years I had been here, found the energy to actually consider my situation.

It was... odd, really. I felt like this all should have met something to me. That I should have found my entire situation surprising, or absurd. I had died, and now, here I was, alive, and in another universe.

It should have awed me.

It should have shaken my worldview.

But I felt nothing. Looking back on my original world - _Terra Res_, I though, giving it a name - I had died without a reason to live, when everything came to an end. All that had remained in me was a reason not to die, and that, by itself, was not enough to make me care about my own continued existence. Not emotionally at least.

Hence, the insane recklessness of introducing myself to Kazu.

"Jeeze," I muttered, curling up into myself, "What was I thinking?"

The question was rhetorical, but I knew the answer: I hadn't been.

* * *

**SNI**

* * *

Getting into the Academy didn't take long. While my age might've raised a few eyebrows in a culture world with a child soldier taboo, Konoha had nothing of the sort. If you had a working body, they would happily turn you into a weapon as long as you were able to speak with a certain minimum of coherence. I did, and so within a day, I was in. Unfortunately, the Elite string wasn't even an option for me - that class was composed entirely of clan heads, according to the admissions officer. If it was a lie, I couldn't tell.

The day after I matriculated, I walked into a classroom, and was made to give a brief introduction.

"Akino Kaede," I said, and that was all. I didn't plan on getting to know anyone, here. There was no point. Most of them would be dead in a few years, given the war, and I had my own problems to deal with.

I spent the rest of the day listening to a basic lecture on the properties of chakra, which were fairly simple inasmuch as the lecture was designed for children who were two years older than my biological age. In this world, the human body generated mental and physical energy - named _in_ and _yō_. In civilians, these were separate things. The first step to becoming a shinobi was finding them, and mixing them together irrevocably. Doing this, the undifferentiated energy that resulted would become chakra.

Surprisingly, the basic exercise that did this was mind-numbingly simple - a bit of goal oriented zen meditation. While I had never made a discipline of meditating, it still wasn't even something recognizable as a challenge - for someone with an adult mind, anyway. As the rest of the class squirmed, and figeted, I sat still, and let all things pass. After about an hour, I reached the boundary of meditative ego death and slammed into a wall.

Normally, when all thoughts completed themselves, my awareness would begin to flicker. Timeless gaps of being without the concept of "I" would appear until, in one of the gaps where I had the flickering of a selfconcept, I would decide to end the meditation, and usually feel somewhat refreshed if not particularly enlightened. Not so, here. While I might've lost my concept of self, the intrusion of two distinct _things_ that had nothing to do with the external world stopped me. I was used to my heartbeat, the feeling of potential in my muscles, the rhythm of breathing. These two sensations were completely new, and did not belong.

One felt like burning darkness. The other, concealing light. Obvious sensory metaphors for Yin and Yang.

All that was left was to muddle the Taiji.

With an instinct that I had never had in my first life, and which was, therefore, something that belonged entirely to the part of me that was Akino Kaede, I threw the two sensations through each other. From my heart, a slow, aching burn propagated throughout my body. I opened my eyes, wincing slightly at the pain, and met the instructor's - Ueda Rokurou's - eyes. A frown marred his face, as he stood up, made the universal gesture of _follow me_, and walked out the classroom's door. Quitley, so as not to disturb the children, I got up, and followed.

In the hallway, Rokurou asked a simple question: "How do you feel, Kaede-chan?"

"Hurts," I said, considered for an instant, and added, "Did I do something wrong, sensei?"

"That's unlikely," Rokurou replied. "Where did the pain start?"

I tapped my sternum, and Rokurou's eyebrows rose fractionally before he killed the expression.

"You've unlocked you chakra," he said, then murmured something I didn't quite catch. After a moment, he continued, "Well, you've graduated from this class, Kaede-chan. Go to room 203 tommorrow, instead. You can go home."

Without so much as a goodbye, Rokurou turned, and walked back into the classroom, sliding the door shut behind him. I walked out.

* * *

"You _what_!?" Kazu's reaction was far less restrained.

"Unlocked my chakra," I said. "I take it that an hour isn't particularly normal."

"Two _months_ is normal, Uzumaki," Kazu had taken to calling me by the name of the clan he thought I was a member of. After reading a book he had checked our from the civilian library, I didn't exactly blame him. My hair wasn't precisely _crimson_, but it was a good deal more red than I had seen on anyone else, and I _had_ been paying attention. For the first years of my life, people-watching had been my only source of entertainment.

It didn't bother me. Names are just labels. Convenient, but not particularly necessary.

"Still," Kazu began, and I abandoned my line of thought to focus on him, "I can't exactly say I'm surprised. Your clan always was famous for their vitality. Sage's blood, though, you aren't planning on being low-key, are you?"

"Low key?" I cocked my head. "Why would I care about that? I couldn't get in to the Elite class, so if I can do things faster than a normal child, maybe they'll realise that I'm wasted as a piece of the meat grinder at their frontiers."

"I suppose..." Kazu said, voice trailing off uncertainly. "Listen. Being a genius? That's good. Konoha _loves_ their geniuses. But... They also don't really trust them, after Madara."

"Who is...?"

"_Was_." Kazu corrected. "Madara Uchiha was probably one of the single strongest Shinobi in Konoha's history. Flames that could burn stone for seven days and seven nights. Crushing space. Controlling Bijuu. A monster in the shape of a man. He was also the greatest traitor in the history of the village. And... the geniuses of Konoha disproportionately are. Probably because they could see the _will of fire_ as the shoddy piece of indoctrination that it really is."

"Ah," I said. Not that Kazu was a reliable source vis-a-vis _anything_ Konoha, but... "Will of fire?"

"You'll probably begin hearing about it sometime this week," said Kazu. "Basically, Senju Hashirama decided to build a superpower by subjugating clans under the ideal of strength through unity."

"Which was bad because..."

"Because it _didn't work_. Hundreds of years of enmity, and he expected it to go away because of some pretty words? Feh. No, the system that the Shodaime built was a ploy for something else: establishing the supremacy of the Senju clan in Hinokuni."

I nodded, as if simply accepting his words as an obvious truth.

"Well, whatever," Kazu said with not inconsiderable derision. "It succeeded, so I guess I can't condemn the man's brilliance. The problem was what it forced the other countries to do. Tell me, what does it feel like when you walk to their Shinobi Academy?"

I blinked, then thought about it. After a moment, I answered, "It feels like I'm just going for a walk, usually."

Kazu nodded, as if he expected the answer. "Exactly. Konoha was _planned_ from the beginning. in the other villages, even Kiri, you can _feel_ the tensions. Even Konoha still has a hell of a lot of problems - just last year, some Inuzuka went on a murder spree in the Aburame compound due to a generational grudge. She made some romantic overtures, got inside, and... well, you get the idea. Before, it wouldn't have worked. No trust. But the villages made that possible.

"That's Konoha. The real problem is that all the other major powers were forced to inaugurate their own hidden villages, and it was a knee-jerk reaction. Tens of thousands died. Dozens of clans were lost in every country, _except_ for Hinokuni. The Hokage was a _genius_."

It wasn't a compliment.

The conversation degenerated after that point, with rhetoric and invective being the ordes of the day. Something about the entire situation was personal to Kazu. Maybe he had been - was - a member of one of the decimated clans? I didn't know. I didn't ask. Instead, I simply listened, nodding and making appropriate sounds as I consumed his perspective. After about an hour, his anger petered out, and I excused myself.

Tomorrow would be an interesting day.

* * *

**SNI**

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Terra Res**

The _specific_ Earth of the _specific_ Quantum World that Akino Kaede comes from.

**Resian**

Adjective. Prn. REE-zee-in. Def. _Of or pertaining to the world which contains the Earth of Kaede's origin._

I _could_ go on using "the quantum worlds", "the world of my birth" and other overwrought terms, but I hope we can agree that Resian forms a nice alternative that keeps things moving, and which doesn't assign undue importance to every single reference to the original world.

**Taiji**

A concept commonly represented by the Yin-Yang. No, not the thing in my avatar. That's representative of something else entirely.


	6. Reduction to the Absurd

Math had been called the supreme achievement of the human spirit, once. While the sentiment was very poorly articulated, the actual meaning behind it - that mathematics was what distinguished men from animals - was fair enough, although I might've gone with logic instead. In my previous life, I had devoted what was frankly and _obsessive_ amount of time and effort to the goal of mastering what I had considered to be the language of reality. I had never contributed anything particularly novel to the field, but then, my goal wasn't to advance things. Just to understand them.

It was more than a little shocking to find out that, in this world, I had more in common with the animals than the humans.

The first days in the Shinobi Academy's proper classes were primer-level material. Basic kanji, hiragana, katakana, otogana - the last was the only system I had to devote time to. It was a cursive shorthand used in sealing techniques. The class also covered basic maths, propagandised history, and so forth. Did you know that Hashirama Senju was Treesus Christ? After the fortieth story of his total awesomeness, I sure did.

Madara Uchiha wasn't mentioned at all. He wasn't just a bad memory - as far as Konohagakure was concerned, the man had never existed. You could see traces of him, though, in the way that Senju Akagai-sensei's eyes narrowed when he spoke Uchiha Otofumi's name in the role call. Madara wasn't mentioned at all. But he wasn't forgotten.

About a week into the class, I gained the first inkling that something was, well, not _wrong_, but very, very different. I was almost dozing at the time.

"And so by using _telation_, the properties of three can be given to five, thus rendering five divisible by it. The result is a secondary number that..." My head snapped up as I came to full awareness. Akagai's eyes narrowed at the display, but he made nothing of it -

Was telation integer division?

"...don't really expect you to understand it, the actual basis of numbers is a bit far ahead of the class, and unimportant unless you want to get into jutsu creation. Nevertheless, I expect you to do the homework and be familiar with the procedure by tomorrow. You will be tested. Class dismissed."

I did not ask the question. Instead, I left with the rest of the students, and returned to the place that I slept at.

"Kaz'-san," I said as I walked in. The children were still up, and even though they had already realised that I was not like them, it really, really wouldn't do to act like a true[false] adult[genius]. Being seen as a genius was good. Being seen as a research concern wasn't. "Hows telation work?"

Kazu, for his part, was in the middle of breaking up a fight between Hibiki and Saya, two children who probably wouldn't ever become important enough to bother being concerned about. Given this, his response was as expected: "Don't have time now, Kaede-chan. Ask later!"

I did. Kazu's explanation, though, was completely unintelligible.

But it wasn't because it was math above my head. No. As I said, the things we were currently being taught were the basics of the basics, and I knew far more than those. I had had to - in the end, the endless marches of patterns and paradigms that existed in them had been the only thing of novelty left. The other patterns embedded in the concept of _homo universalis_ had faded as I had grown older and more bitter by slow and subtle degrees.

The level of math taught in children's class should have been nothing to me - but it wasn't.

It wasn't because I couldn't understand the concepts.

It wasn't because they were thought about in different ways.

It wasn't even because Kazu had made a mistake in his explanation.

It was because what he offered me was something that I knew was utterly impossible under _any_ developed system of axioms that I knew of. It was a fantastic description of a magical process that should not _ever_ have worked. It violated theorems so fundamental that they existed in the without of anything that humans would have considered numbers. It violated identities and truths so fundamental that, if it had worked in what Shinigami had called the quantum words, _reality itself_ would have been invalid, and by that nature was itself invalid: reduction ad absurdum

But it was valid.

_Here_, it valid, and the world remained.

It wasn't that Math was different here.

Reality _itself_ was.

For the first time, I understood just how far from home I truly was.

I managed to suppress the panic attack until I was up in my dorm, and then spent about an hour hyperventilating while intermittently screaming into my pillow until someone kicked me in the side. Lashing out blindly, I ran to the window, slipped out, and dropped into the street with what was probably a suspicious amount of grace. I ran blindly for a while afterwards until I found myself in the middle of a clearing surrounded by trees. Snarling wordlessly and suddenly furious, I lashed out, striking one of the trees over, and over, and over again, my heart beating wildly.

Everything I knew was a lie.

Everything.

_All of it!_

The _only_ thing that wasn't destroyed before the Transcension was math. Everything else - _everything_ else - was reduced to a pattern of neuronal firing inspired by the same. There were computers that could create music that was, for one _specific_ listener the most utterly beautiful thing in the world - transcendent of all other music. Music that would constantly evolve as a person evolved, and grew, and changed, always maintaining that utter and transhuman perfection, but never, _ever_ perfect for anyone but the intended listener.

Humanity had _solved_ music in the narrowest sense possible. One by one, other fields were solved as well, and eventually, culture died. All the great works were forgotten, because before the absolute perfection of the new, computer-generated Transcendental Arts why would you ever bother? A perfect story would make its reader sad when they _subconsciously_ _needed_ to be sad, happy when happiness was called for. They made them laugh when they got bored, but always found enough of a pause that there never was a moment where the reader couldn't stop if they felt they needed to put the book down. That was music. That was literature. That was art.

Solved, and always conforming utterly and precisely to your spoken and unspoken desires and expectations.

_This is your soul, _the algorithms said, _and we have parsed it_.

Before that, what meaning did any of my pursuits have? A story known to no one isn't a story, it's a secret. And a keeper of unspoken secrets is not something I ever wanted to be.

Only one field remained. The maths. They couldn't be perfected, because by their nature, they were already perfected. They couldn't be invented, because the point of the maths was the _discovery_. They couldn't be conveyed, because the ideas represented in their notation could not be _simply_ understood - it took time, and effort, and dedication.

They were the one format that could not truly be automated.

And they were all that I had left.

Thirty years after I was born, and until the the day I died: A life spent towards nothing but the utter pursuit of absolute knowledge because _everything_ else had failed.

And it had been given to me _at a stroke_ that the only thing at the bottom of reality was meaningless chaos. There was no _basis_! There was nothing, nothing, _nothing_ that could relate the concepts of this world to the ones I had known, and that suggested that the only true System of Reality was Incoherence - crystallised from the chaos, on the edge of the breakdown of the primordial gap -

\- _no beauty, no structure, no truth, no form_ -

\- everything was true/everything was false, and the only thing that determined which was where you were. What _point_ was there in studying static?

What in the world was to be gained from a map of noise!?

I began laughing deliriously, enraptured and enraged simultaneously, until, spent, I stumbled and fell backwards, knuckles bleeding everywhere.

Everything I knew was a lie. All of it, from the ground up, was invalid. Even thus, even so, the world was here, and that above all was the proof that all of what I had been shown was real.

"Damn it," I muttered, lifting one burning, throbbing hand up, and covering my eyes. "It never ends." And I couldn't even tell you what emotion was attached to that statement. Elation, weariness, anticipation, desperation, despair - it all blended together into one ceaseless melange of all, and nothing in between.

"No, it doesn't, does it?" The voice, spoken in English with a rich, cultured accent shocked me to my feet.

Before me stood a man dressed in the fashion of latter-day Earth.

Before me stood the most dangerous being in the world.

Before me stood the Samsara Breaker.

* * *

_**S**ha **N**agba **I**muru_

* * *

**The Math of the Shinobi Rikugou **

I'm not even going to try to explain this in depth. Why? Because _definitionally_, it can't be explained in our reality. The Axioms that our math, our logic, and our universe flow from _do not allow_ the coherent explanation of what is happening here.

That said, some essential properties are as follows: Five sets of integers, no such thing as fractions/reals/irrationals, and a geometry that is inherently and entirely appoximate - calculating even simple areas requires the rough equivalent of an infinite series, which is then appropriately scaled to match the object in question via a series of telations that also produce other relevant information (such as relative chakra composition, useful in onyoujutsu) as a side effect.

Telation is from the Greek word _Telos_. It is, explicitly, the operation that connects the abstract domain of this multiverse's math to the physical world.

A common philosophical position in the world that Kaede currently lives in is that the difference between nature and artefice is that natural creations are _infinitely correct. _This is to say that the infinite series analogues that underlie their form a fully iterated, wheras human creations rely on partially-iterated approximations of the truth - but this is a subtle concern, not commonly in the awareness of Shinobi. An academic matter, really.

It should be noted that every single term used here is at best inexact and at worst utterly inacurate. As I said, the true nature of what it is can't be explained.

* * *

A/N: Oh what the _fuck_.

Reaction to the appearance of something the gods fear so soon aside, when I do reach the same level of math as this latter day version of myself, I'm probably going to have to edit the hell out of this chapter. I can't even imagine where I got things wrong, but I damn well did, I'm sure.

Incidentally, if any mathematicians are reading this, can someone tell me why treating infinity as an unsigned singularity _like zero_ to force n/0 to yield consistent results breaks math? Or point me towards a resource that gives me the tools I need to show myself why treating the real numbers as a tube doesn't work. Anything's appreciated.

**Thanks for reading!**

**Oh, and to Bob, the anon reviewer: Thanks, it's nice to know that I succeeded in making the summary epic! :D **


	7. Hajimemashite!

SNI

* * *

Before me stood a man dressed in the fashion of latter-day Earth.

Before me stood the most dangerous being in the world.

Before me stood the Samsara Breaker.

_IMPERATIVE: _**DEATH.**

The seal on my back flared to life, and without my will, without my consent, I felt myself lunge forward to _end_ him—

—as with an ease that I couldn't replicate, he dodged.

"You know," he said, "All I want at the moment is to have a conversation. And you _can't_ reach me, Akino Kaede. Or do you prefer █▟▚▜▌ ▓▉░▙▁▆?"

Hearing the label[name] that people had once called me by was enough to shock me out of my attempt to end it all and be done with this world, although the seal still burned and my muscles still sang with a wholly foreign power. It pulled on me, tugged me forward, goading me towards patterns that I was sure the Administrator of Death felt likely to _end_ the Breaker.

But it was too soon. _Far_ too soon. My body was only six, and I couldn't _hope_ to match him.

"Ah," he said, "I thought that I might have gotten your attention with that. Tell me, how does it feel to know that your fated enemy knows everything about you, while you know nothing about them?"

"Like a story," I said, deadpan, and slowly drew myself out of the stance that Shinigami's seal had dragged me into. "So you aren't going to kill me."

"Kill you? _My_, no. So long as you are bound by that marvellous seal, if you die, you will be reborn not in another world, _but in this one_. Killing you would be like inaugurating the dance of Shiva and Kali: destruction rebirth destruction rebirth; always beautiful and utterly _pointless_." He smiled, and there was no particular _anything_ in the expression.

"No, I have no desire to kill you. Only to survive long enough to die of my own accord... Which may be very long indeed. Until then, this world can serve as a—what was the term your worldline used? A sandbox? Yes. A sandbox."

I sagged in relief. Someone who regarded a world full of people as a playground was dangerous but—

And then, I was missing an arm.

"You little _fool_," The Samsara Breaker hissed, holding the missing limb as I held back a scream. "I said I was not going to kill you. Anything else is my prerogative—_not_ yours. You live at my sufferance. Did you think that I would take kindly to one of my inferiors bartering my life away to a god, for a _passport_? Do you think I am not _aware_ of your full and total intentions? Feh." And then, without a flicker, or a displacement of air, he stood in front of me and roughly shoved my severed arm back into its socket with a muttered "_Curaga_."

Even through the haze of pain, I recorded the word, and briefly wondered in the worlds of Square Enix were real, too. Briefly, because in the next moment the world spun crazily, and the wind was knocked out of me as I found myself on the ground with a boot to my throat blocking all attempts to take the breath that would refill my lungs.

"So this is what I'm going to do," the Breaker said, as if he was discussing the weather. "I'm going to leave you be for now. I'm going to let you grow. I'm going to let you develop. I'm going to let the baby bird unfurl its wings." I thrashed around, frantically, struggling for air, and I might've been pinned under a pillar of stone for all the good it did me. The Samsara Breaker gave no appearance of noticing, looking not at me, but at the world he was describing. Fantasizing.

"And then—why—I'm going to break them. Crush them to powder, starting at the tips, then tear them out at the roots. And then I'll do worse things. I'll do things that make the Cenobites look like _children_. What do you think about that, Kaede?"

He looked down at me, clearly expecting an answer, and seemed genuinely surprised and horrified to see my weakening struggles under his boot.

"I'm sorry!" He said reflexively, jumping off of my body and a few feet back, an expression of childlike contrition on his face. "I'm so sorry. I just get a bit excited sometimes when interesting things happen, you know, like people being stupid enough not to be afraid. Are you afraid now?"

I was too busy breathing to reply, so instead, I nodded, the motion jerky as my veins sang with adrenaline.

I was fucking _terrified_.

"Oh," he said, and the energy and life just seemed to drain out of him. "Well, I'm going to go, then. Maybe if I stay away long enough, you'll forget to fear me again, na?"

And—just like that—he was gone. No transition. No displacement of air.

Gone.

I laid in the clearing for a long time.

Finally, as the sun rose, I stood up, and began the long process of limping back onto the map, and from there, into the orphanage.

I had a session at the academy today.

I didn't care.

I needed to re-evaluate every decision I had made when I was born into this world, starting with the first.

The seal on my shoulderblade, hidden as a birthmark, subtly burned.

* * *

S-N-I

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Shini Tei'in**

The Seal of Death's Body. One of the seals created instinctively by the being known as Shinigami, it is applied to the target's soul, and is echoed on their body. In the presence of a specified individual, phenomenon, or object, it forcibly raises the attributes of the individual it is placed on to C-Rank nin equivalent by removing biological limiters and granting a set of foreign instincts to motion that art, in effect, a taijutsu style. This style has no name, and was seized from the well of all possibilities by Shinigami as the seal was made.

The Shini Tei;in Does not grant any nin, gen, dou, fuin, or onyojutsu.

If Kaede ever increases her abilities to above C-Rank, this seal will become a hindrance rather than a help, although it seems to be manifestly useless in any case.

This seal only activates in the presence of a Samsara Breaker. As I said. Manifestly. _Useless_.

Designed assuming user was adult: In this chapter, Kaede attained E-Rank skills and superficial damage to her keirakukei. This is yet another reason why Kaede gave the Shini and Rinne kami a lower case g.

This particular instance of the seal also contains an irregular function that alters the perceptions of the individual it is placed on. This has the effect of generating a phenomenon best described as targeted agnosia, and makes any thoughts, feelings, perceptions or ideas about or relating to the Shinobi Rikugou based on information obtained in the individual's previous life nearly if not completely impossible to consciously perceive.

Gee, _thanks_ guys.

**Keirakukei**

A metaphysical circulatory system through which Chakra circulates.


	8. Updating Beliefs

In Konoha's only orphanage, a girl stood and stared at her reflection in the mirror with all the attention of an artist trying to capture a form. Her face was rather bony, yet not unattractive, even in childhood, but neither would she be anything remarkable to look at when she was grown. In some ways it was an average face, in other ways it wasn't, but the exceptional qualities were met and cancelled by the subnormal ones, all the same. She had ashy red hair that would have looked more appropriate on a fifty year old when seen from a distance. When closer, one would be able to tell that not a single strand was actually the pure grey of old age—there just wasn't enough red to overcome its otherwise colourless nature.

Her body was a child's body, and held all the awkwardness expected of such a thing. Again—and if a certain theory was correct, this was because she was of shinobi stock—there were no deformities, but neither was there a real map of the person she would become. It was, in every conceivable way, as close to the average ideal as possible. This, she knew not from the reflection, but from her bi-weekly ablutions. At present, most of her form was hidden in loose clothes, this being because low quality fabric two sizes too large was the most effective to buy on the limited budget the Hokage had assigned to the facility.

The only thing that was truly memorable about her, in the end, were her eyes.

They were unique, in all her observations. Ring heterochromia simply wasn't a condition that attained, here. Perhaps they would be useful in the future, perhaps not. Across all parametres, one thing held true: they were the only thing in her form that was _off_. For the rest, one would have to look at her mental nature. The attitudes. The coldness. The studied cynicism of a mind that had grown weary of the world before the world had grown weary of the universe that had given it everything.

"This," I said, staring into my reflection and committing every detail to memory, "is me."

There is something that most people do not understand about quantum immortality, which is the concept that for all outcomes there is a world, and for all worlds that lead to your death, there are futures where you are still alive. It comes from a small error of thinking. A human error.

When you don't think things through, this is what you see: that you cannot die. The natural assumption is that you can, by the grace of technology, continue in your present state for all eternity.

Once, I had known better: Quantum Immortality was nothing less than the absolute prohibition of subjective death. It was also nothing more.

You could, in fact, be a quantum immortal and at the mercy of a psychopath willing to slowly paint your skin with acid. As long as they didn't kill you, that worldline was valid. Other hells proliferate the shadows of possibility, but it was _hard_ to treat such infinitesimal things with the seriousness they deserve. Once, I had, but over a century and more I had never faced anything like it, and so I had forgotten, for decades in my first life, and for the five years I had lived of this one.

Now, and only now, I remembered. And I had remembered too late.

I had found the person with the means to torture me forever, and then I had dropped my guard.

So _fucking_ stupid.

In the end, it was because I had stagnated. My thoughts had become locked into a pattern dominated by certain assumptions. They had been valid assumptions, back on Earth, but here? Here, they were bad ideas.

For example, the idea that I could take anything the world threw at me and not just survive, but do so unscathed.

That was true of my old body. That was true of a body that was the product of a hundred years of exponential genetic understanding culminating into something that only something as terrible as a gamma ray burst could have killed. There were even survival modalities for _magma _in my genome, by the end.

Although _genome_ was an archaic word, which didn't quite capture the actual meaning of what humanity had engineered to govern physical bodies, at future's end.

That was not true of Akino (Uzumaki?) Kaede. Akino Kaede's only advantage was her intelligence, and that was a stolen thing - the real Kaede was fated to die, but she probably wasn't anything remarkable - probability disallowed it. I myself was only slightly to the right side of the bell curve at best, and even that: only was because my mind, subtly enhanced by the transhuman legacy that humanity had created in its final years, had been decoupled from my body, and taken from my original form by the complete death of my world.

Then there was the next matter. The assumption that the other Samsara Breaker was like me.

He wasn't. He wasn't like me at all.

I - I was _spectacularly_ bad at being human. At seeing the lines that should not be crossed, and thinking within them.

But that thing? That force of nature? Apparently it had once been human—but I couldn't fucking see it. If I swum on the surface of monsterdom, that _thing_ lived in challenger deep. It was terrible at being human, but more than that? It was old. It had lived at least twice times the number of lives that I had, and three of those fully. This one, an original, something in a universe set in the patterns that Square Enix's writers thought in, and... _**Cenobites**_.

Fucking _hell_, I was out of my depth.

I had been treating this entire lifetime as if it were a game, and now, for the first time, I could not just _see_ the consequences of failure, but _understand_ them. If I wanted to survive, I had to have a plan, because it was _damn_ clear that nothing I could accomplish by skill alone was going to see me through.

The beginning was easy. The broad outline had been clear from the moment Kazu had spoken about the Uzumaki. A contract with Shinigami. A detente with a _god._ From what I had picked up over the few years of my life, the word _contract_ in proximity with _shinobi_ only meant one thing: summoning. If I was not going to fail, then that was my only hope of salvation, and it would require an audacity that I had only ever written with.

But it was that or hell, and so where I might normally have quailed, I had no choice at all. The bones of a plan emerged, if only because I dipped into my own reservoir of insanity and unbelieved that I couldn't win.

You see, deciding what the future is is manifestly simple. You define it. And then you _bleed_ until it becomes real. You drive yourself to the edge, then over the edge. You hit rock bottom, and break into pieces. You take those pieces, and remake yourself into an expression of intent so pure that being it _requires_ you to walk on the outside of reason. Then, once you have shaped yourself into the function necessary to create the conditions you need to attain simply to exist, you just live.

And everything you are will make the world you _need_ to survive as inevitable as your abilities can attain.

What most people don't understand is this: _Identity is a weapon_. What most people do understand is that identity is what they are. What most people cannot accept is that, in finality, that which orchestrates their actions is not their identity, but that which lies behind it. The pattern of will, of agency. That, in the end, is all and the only thing that separates us from words on a page.

And that will can determine the pattern of the end far better than someone who thinks that what they value is equivalent with their _self_, far better than a natural identity ever can.

I had done this once before.

But in the end, I had given up. When humanity had fled the universe instead of trying to _fix_ it, I had lost the foundation of my reality, and my will had crumbled.

Now, the only thing holding me back had been lost as well. And once again, I found myself on the precipice, capable of change.

Akino Kaede had been a tool that I had manipulated to interact with the world. And like a tool, I had regarded her as ultimately expendable. I couldn't afford to do so anymore. So I stared at myself, and carefully committed every detail to memory. What I had been no longer mattered. What mattered, now, was that _this_ is who I was. I couldn't afford the conceit of thinking otherwise.

At length, I was satisfied, although it would take time to learn to look in the mirror and think _me_ with all the reflexive truth that had accompanied that thought in my original world. Walking out of the bathroom and into my dorm, I pulled a thin sheaf of papers out from under my bed, and began defining the problem.

My priority, now, was simple: I had to make it into the elite class. Nothing I learned was likely to save me, but with enough, I might buy some time. Using the tools of this world, I had to make myself as much a monster as I possibly could. It wouldn't be easy. Nothing worth accomplishing ever was. But it was a path forward.

And so the astract of the future had been determined. Become an elite. Master my chakra. Find the contract. Summon the god.

And the piece that required my insanity?

**Renegotiate.**

* * *

**SNI**

* * *

**Ring Heterochromia**

Eyes one colour on the outside, another within, where the contrast between the two is harsh enough that you can't call it a transition.

**Transhumanism**

By some estimates, within the next twenty years, humanity will attain mastery of all the functions of natural life. At this point, improving on nature becomes possible. In the previous world, this happened, and this version of me took to it like a fish to water.

**Cenobites**

Forgot this last chapter. A group of people, if people are the word, who are apostles of experience. They instruct the world in the ultimates of both pleasure and pain, beyond the limits of both sanity and madness. Evil, by human standards, but I consider them more on lovecraftian terms. Fundamentally amoral, they do not _fit_ inside a human conception of the world.

* * *

A/N: As of this chapter Sha Nagba Imuru is being edited under the aegis of Enbi. Any increases in quality that you notice are probably because of it.

On a related note, if you're looking for an interesting Naruto SI with excellent worldbuilding, I reccomend False Spring by the same author. You can find it on my faves, or by typing the following SID into your URL bar: 10695613

On an unrelated note, I now have an ending planned to this story. Gods only know if we'll ever reach it.


	9. Who the hell names their daughter Salt?

I couldn't remember the Samsara Breaker's face. Well no, that wasn't accurate. I couldn't remember a lot of things about him. Height, build, race, age—all of it was a blank. I could remember the clothes. They had been richly made, mid 21st century fare.

But the man who wore them was completely empty. Really, apart from his words and the idea that he was, well, a _he_, there was nothing there. Worse, I had only noticed this by a fluke—it wasn't like I had suddenly lost the memories. If I had ever known what he had looked like and had lost _that,_ it would have been fairly blatant—I wouldn't remember, per se, but I would remember remembering.

But I suspected that I had never seen the truth of the other Breaker at all.

And at the time, when we had first met, I hadn't even noticed it.

Shinobi had a word for that type of thing. _Genjutsu_. But compared to what little we had been shown, this was on a whole different level. Genjutsu could create illusions or false surroundings, but there always had to be a point of transition—if you wanted to create a false world, you had to give the victim of that world a reasonable narrative to sell the lie. You had to conserve _consistency_, because breaking a genjutsu was as easy as punching yourself in the face, even if you had no chakra.

What the Breaker had done was create an inconsistent world—_he had no face—_and then prevented me from realising it even as I had stared into the truth of the lie across our entire encounter.

Even the Shodaime hadn't been capable of that. His famous darkness genjutsu created an obvious falsehood that couldn't be escaped, but it couldn't conceal the falsity of its own nature.

_Well, me_, I thought, _that's just another excellent reason to stop being a living example of mediocrity, isn't it?_

"Yes," I murmured, "it is."

Of course, the problem was that I had all the reasons in the world, but none of the access needed to make it happen. I needed to get into the Elite string, but all Kazu knew was that transfers were possible. Whatever the precise details of his assignment, it had nothing to do with observing Konoha's training methods, which made the question of _why_ he had infiltrated the orphanage of all things all the more interesting.

But no, I was losing focus. Kazu's knowledge of inter-string transfers had ended there. My inquiries, however subtle, bore no more fruit. It could be done, Kazu told me. It couldn't, said everyone else. My benefactor had no reason to lie to me—the further I got in Konoha's hierarchy, the more useful I would be if Kiri ever decided to tap me. So it was likely that this was the sort of Shinobi crap that would have made a real ninja—a ninja from the quantum worlds—smile.

Hidden tests. Layers of deception. But possibly—_just_ possibly—entirely unintentionally. It wasn't like most people were supposed to have a foreign spy feeding them information on the test. Perhaps there was no deception at all, and promotion was simply a matter of sole the time being, all I could do was continue to gather information.

Even if I did have the method, odds were I wasn't yet capable of using it.

It all came back to math.

Math was different. Logic was different. That meant that every. single. thing. that depended on math and logic was different, too. Sometimes, the convergence was surprising. Geometry seemed to be predicated on something vaguely analogous to infinite series here, but even though you needed to carry out long, _long_ calculations to get the area of a square, it was still in essence a square. Of course, pi did not exist, and circles along with other curves always produced results that were similar in simplicity to getting the area of a square in the quantum worlds.

The problem was, I was terrible about it.

It was all still pattern-based. This world was consistent, and so its laws were not things of pure randomness. But, a scenario: You have spent your entire life playing classical music. On a trip, you encounter a culture that calls anti-music their music. Instead of looking to create finely structured compositions, they declare beauty as transcendent randomness. It isn't structureless—the lack of structure is still a pattern, and one that is as finely designed as one of Mozart's pieces, because they don't value ordinary randomness, which emerges after you listen to static long enough, no—they value something that is random no matter how finely it's sliced. Endlessly fractal infinities of noise.

So their music is deeply patterned, and poignant, and beautiful, and after seventy years of playing and listening to the best works of the finest classical masters, to you, it sounds like static.

That, at its core, was the root of all of my academic problems. There were a few areas—chief among them, tactical simulations and decision theory—where the patterns of the Shinobi Rikugou resolved into mirrors of my own experience. They would have to, for humans to exist. But the other areas were things that were actually _worse_ than my little analogy.

Music—not elemental listening, but seeing the finest details and levels of structure in it—is an acquired skill. Learning to ignore something like that in the face of that is difficult, but it can be done with the right investment of time and effort.

Our minds have the necessary math burned into them by a billion years of evolution. _That_ was what I had to learn to ignore. It helped—barely, but it helped—that I was no longer just thinking with just my own mind. As Shinigami had said, in arriving in this universe, I had accreted a soul. That soul, which I assumed was like any other, had come with the instincts of someone born to this world and all the implicit understanding needed to function.

I just had to learn to listen to it.

It was a major undertaking, and, in some sense, the problem that I had taken most personally to solving.

But in absolute terms, the larger concern was that something about my chakra was _wrong_.

I learnt about it when we were introduced to a very basic exercise meant to begin developing the foundation of our abilities. It was simple. Bring chakra into your hand. Press your hand against the ground. Pull up dead leaves.

While the other students took hours to figure out how to channel the chakra that they had created, I pulled it out in ten minutes, got it into my hand in another five, and reached out to touch the ground. I did manage to pull up a leaf. But then, the dirt wavered, then flashed black and vanished.

Akagai Senju, who instructed the class, was of no help. He had no idea of what was wrong. So this was how I spent the next two months—slowly beginning to learn to trust Kaede's instincts, and falling further and further behind my peers in the core discipline of what it was to be a Shinobi.

I think that if it had just been a matter of external chakra difficulties, Konoha might've written it off as a particularly bizarre and useless Kekkei Genkai. The problem was that, as it stood, my chakra _only_ affected nonliving things. I couldn't even enhance my own stamina. Eventually, Akagai pulled me aside one day, and simply told me not to come back. Then he misinterpreted my trepidation for shame, and told me that I could still serve Konoha. Maybe I had considered apprenticing to a blacksmith? Konoha definitely needed arms, and arms dealers were a vital part of the machine that kept the war going—if everyone was a Shinobi, he exclaimed, then nobody could win.

I almost sneered at the man, but I controlled myself, nodded, and began to walk off, trying to think of another plan.

And that was when Yamanaka Shio made her move.

* * *

I was out of the gates quickly when I heard rapidly approaching footsteps approach behind me.

"Hey!" Young voice, a classmate. Here for a juvenile taunt?

I was not in the mood.

I increased my pace, hoping that the nonverbal message would be enough... but I had forgotten that I was dealing with children instead of adults. Eventually, the owner of the footsteps caught up to me, and I stopped—we were both winded, but the person following me had some ability to properly use chakra. I did not.

"You -" The voice panted behind me, "_rude_."

I felt myself begin to snarl and halted, smoothing the expression into a pleasant nothing as I turned to give my pursuer my undivided attention.

She had blond hair, brown eyes so dark you couldn't really see the pupil, a narrow face and the typically perfect proportions of a clan child. Her hair was tied off into a lopsided ponytail, and the clothes she wore, were not of the rougher weave that you saw in children coming from middle-class families. At the time, though, her name eluded me. This was probably because I hadn't bothered to remember the names of any of my classmates back when I was still treating life as a game. I was considering the best way to deal with her when she spoke.

"Akino Kaede?"

I nodded sharply.

"I'm Yamanaka Shio, and, um. I want to make a deal."

Yamanaka? One of the founding clans?

Perhaps this wasn't the minus-sum interaction I had thought it was going to be.

My anger slowly drained away, leaving me feeling an empty sort of curiosity. The strange thing though was that Shio _saw_ it. Lack of enhancements or no, I wasn't bad at hiding my emotions. They shouldn't have been so easily accessible to a six year old girl. Her eyes got a little wide, she took a step back, and I... sighed.

"I'm sorry," I said although I wasn't, really. "I thought you were chasing me for... something else." Which purchased me a look of confusion, and not much more. "Your deal?"

Shio nodded, regaining some of her confidence. "I know what's wrong with your Chakra. My family has a similar problem all the time. Just not so... extreme."

Well, wasn't that convenient?

"Your price?" I asked, not quite able to keep the curtness out of my voice. Shio had probably waited for this moment to make her offer, and she had me over a barrel. What she didn't know was that she literally held my life in her hands, and that I might have traded the same for it. If what the Samsara Breaker has said was right, I would just be reborn anyway—and until I could end him, life... didn't really have much appeal.

"I've been watching you. I know you're smarter than you've been letting on, and -"

"-Your argument for that?" I interjected. I was already going to be doing something I didn't like. Might as well get what let her put it together.

Shio's eye visibly twitched, but with utterly remarkable control for a six year old she answered smoothly, "I saw the math you were doing."

She wasn't talking about my failures. That should have given her the opposite impression. She was talking about trans-versal logic. Ever since I had realised how alien a world I had actually found myself in, I had begun trying to bridge the differences. I hadn't gotten anywhere, but the thing was, I had written that in a purpose-built script. To an outside observer, it should have looked like a simple code writing system. _Should have_ being the operative term. One of the necessities of good notation was a certain sort of sparsity, though. A conservation of complexity.

In principle, anyone could have figured out my script was notation for some kind of formal system.

In practise...?

Kazu had called me a genius. Now, I suspected that I was seeing the actual thing.

"All right," I said, and left it at that. Now wasn't the time to test Yamanaka Shio's strengths and weaknesses. Now was the time to hear her terms. "Talk."

* * *

S_N_I

* * *

A/N: And finally, Kaede is starting to interact with the larger world. About damn time.

Edited by Enbi. Any errors still present are my own.


	10. The Pain that Binds

Yamanaka Shio, disregarding the patent absurdity of her personal name—I did _not_ want to know how drunk her parents had been when they went for that specific appellation—was a person that I knew almost nothing about. After making inquiries to my memory I came up with only a few things. She had decent, clan level athleticism, but was nothing remarkable when it came to Taijutsu, which despite its unfamiliarity was one of the areas that—but for my lack of chakra—I performed respectably in. If she had been a civilian child, or an orphan her performance would have been above average. As it was...

It was clear she trained. Hard. But no harder than any other clan-born. The only other thing my subconscious had tagged was her academic performance. When publicly questioned by a teacher, she had always been fast to answer, and those answers had been perfectly pronounced, their syntax complex. What I couldn't remember was her ever being wrong.

So it was very unlikely that my first impression—intelligent, _genius_—was wrong. Absolutely incomplete, but _not_ wrong.

As we made our way to a training ground accessible to academy students, we exchanged small talk.

"So what was it you were working on, anyway?" Shio.

"Hm?" I asked, "You mean the math thing? It wasn't really math. I'm trying to connect two systems together."

"Those systems being...?"

"I can get the area of a square in two numbers and one operation... And, well, it works, but it's based on different axioms. So different that I can't use telation on the result."

"Um," Shio said, looking at me askance, "Don't take this the wrong way, Akino-san, but what's the _point_ if your way is that useless?"

"Not a damn clue," I admitted, "But I've gone too far in developing my system to not try to make it relevant. Anyway, yeah, I'm trying to find hidden connections, because what I've made feels natural for me, and well—" I glanced to one side, and went through the motions of appearing to be uncomfortable.

Shio bit her lip, then said, "You don't do well with normal math."

So she could read me when I was being honest with my emotions, but couldn't tell when I was lying about how I felt. _Or_, I thought, _she was pretending to not be able to tell, but let's not get paranoid_.

"No," I admitted, "I really don't. Can't tell you why," which was the truth as a sidhe would say it, "but something about it really doesn't agree with my instincts."

Shio nodded. "That... makes a disconcerting amount of sense, really," And there was the vocabulary wholly inappropriate to a six year old. "You have too much mental energy. If I had to guess, you've probably grabbed something most people can't even see, but it's so far from the basics that—" She nodded. "That's it, isn't it? You're doing something like morphic operations "—_whatever those are_, I thought—"but you can't find how it's linked to basic math. Right?"

"It might be that," I allowed, _If I weren't a Samsara Breaker trying to invent extraversal mathematics. _"In the end, I'm not sure. You said I had too much mental energy?"

Shio shook her head. "Not here. I want to know that civilians aren't listening in on us."

"Fair enough," I said, just as Shio stumbled, and something—a brass key—fell out of her shirt, dangling on the end of a lanyard. She blushed, muttered something indistinct, and quickly shoved the key back into it.

Not before I saw something interesting, though.

The key. It was finely made—_very_ finely made. It was nearly as ornate as you might have expected to see in the position of some eighteenth century noble's holding. It had the appearance of more a thing of art than of function, but oh, that was a _lie_. On the shaft, engraved subtly and hiding in plain sight were _otogana_.

A seal. The lock that key was paired with was probably one of the more secure ones in the world—which begged the question of why _Shio_ had the key: she wasn't an heir. What then, about her, warranted making her the guardian of such a treasure?

Interesting. _Very_ interesting.

As I had silently recorded all of this, Shio had reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a pair of glasses, smiling sheepishly. I raised an eyebrow.

"Farsighted," she said. "I try to sit in the back of the class to hide it, but sometimes..."

I nodded. "I won't tell anyone," I said, and meant it. No point in alienating a resource.

"Thanks," Shio replied, smiling.

The rest of the utterly unremarkable walk was exactly that. We arrived at our destination perhaps two minutes later.

Training Ground 27 was a small, desolate place, somehow attaining that property in spite of the trees and its size. The acoustics tended to muffle the sound—of the trees, of your footsteps, of a speaker's voice, and past the grove that cloaked this area from civilian knowledge, there was nothing but scraps of grass and hard-packed dirt, sometimes fused to glass and charred with soot by jutsu. Something about it felt weirdly familiar, but I couldn't _quite_ place my finger on what, exactly, it was.

No students were present yet, school still being in session. There were _probably_ no genin. Higher qualities of shinobi were far beyond my ability to detect. At any rate, Shio decided that things were anonymous enough for her purposes, and after she walked slightly ahead of me and into the centre of the field, she turned, regarding me... _tensely_.

Was this actually something illicit?

After a few moments of obviously struggling with herself, the words rushed out all in a single burst: "_Iwantyoutobemyfriend!_"

_Haaaaaaaa?_ I think my confusion must've shown on my face, because she quickly elaborated.

"The other kids. We aren't like them. We're too smart. There's no common ground."

"And I'm your peer. Is that what you're trying to say?"

"_Obviously_," Shio said, some exasperation bleeding into her voice.

I tried to fit the idea of making friends with a six year old girl into my worldview. It bounced off of it, and my worldview complained about the abuse I had just done it. I told it to shut up and just _do this thing_. It responded with a stream of invective, and ran away crying about how horrible I was, leaving the idea standing out in the cold, alone and unloved 'till the end of time when the stars burned cold, and everything was, in finality, static, and silence.

Which is to say I couldn't do it.

The least I could do was be honest.

"No."

...and feel a twinge of guilt for doing so. Shio was a genius, definitely. She was also a child. Rejection is always an ugly experience, but when you don't have the life experience, it really does _hurt_.

"_Why_?" Not a little bit of pleading there. I sighed.

"Because I can't define it."

And now it was my turn to notice Shio's bewilderment. I elaborated.

"I only believe in things I can categorise. Friendship is too nebulous. It's fun, but it's vague. I'm willing to work with you, but..." _I'm incapable of seeing the world outside of utilitarian terms. _"... a little bit of specification would work nicely. Degree of reciprocity, terminal limits of expected loyalty, motivating interests, overriding objects of proprietary concern. What, specifically do you _want_ from me, Yamanaka Shio-_dono_?"

The use of that suffix was calculated. Civilians treated the shinobi clans in the same way as samurai in Terra Res, the quantum world of my birth, had treated their daimyo. It was a drawing of a line in the sand, and it hurt her.

But it was necessary. I was willing to use and be used by anyone to survive. I wasn't ready to sacrifice someone to my counterpart's amusements. Hopefully, I would never have to be.

There was a long—probably _stunned_—silence, but at last, Shio began to move forward again. "What. That—" She shook her head. "_Why would you look at the world like that?_"

_Because humanity is a game I play poorly?_ "You mean like a shinobi?"

"I mean like a—" Shio cut herself off, and shook her head more than a little bit disbelievingly as I wondered just what it was that she had intended to say. "You know what? _Fine._ Whatever. We'll start with something simple, and maybe I can eventually get what I want."

Did she just bargain herself down? Um. "Okay. The simple thing?"

"The elite string. I want to get in. Standard classes are _boring_." That last word, spoken like the deadliest of curses.

"I feel the same," I said. Shio smiled, and though small, it was genuine. It hurt to see, knowing now that I wouldn't be able to give her the same thing that I had spent the majority of my—

I killed that line of thought, set it on fire, and threw its burning remains out of the window of my consciousness.

"Then that's what we'll do," Shio said, "I'll give you this Yamanaka chakra exercise," she pulled a scroll from somewhere behind her back, "and you'll help me figure out how to get in. And then—"

"We'll negotiate the rest of it later. I'll acknowledge my debt, but my deadline is tomorrow. Akagai-sensei told me not to come back, so when I do, I better have a good reason."

"Tomorrow?" Shio said, "Impossible. I'd be happy to help you keep up, but—"

"Tomorrow." I said. "I unlocked my chakra in a day—"

"—I _know_," Shio said. "That's what made me look at you more closely, Akino-san. And I unlocked mine just as fast. That's how it usually goes for my clan. We're _really_ good at control. Even then, this took me two _weeks_. It takes most who need to learn it even longer. Like I was saying: I'm happy to help you keep up. That was part of what I planned on offering. But this is not something as easy as a little meditation."

_That_—_damn it._ I sighed, then laughed and echoed my thoughts, "Damn it. And here I was, hoping for effortless solutions." I shook my head. That had always been my biggest flaw. I smiled. Somehow, the reciprocity of this...

It was amusing. Not funny, just amusing.

"'_Nothing worth having isn't worth bleeding for_'," Shio said. It had the cant of a quote—simple, direct, and universal.

"Axiomatic, I think," I said, then threw my caution to the wind. "I accept your terms, Yamanaka-san."

Wordlessly, she handed me the tiny scroll, and I opened it.

Despite my best intentions, it was the start of a long friendship.

In the years to come, I would damn myself for it.

* * *

**the final words**

* * *

_Nothing worth having isn't worth bleeding for,  
isn't worth pain, and life, and death,  
isn't worth keeping a secret, or telling a lie,  
or betraying the oldest of friends._

_Nothing worth having isn't worth destroying for,  
the unrequited blood of the innocent that seeps,  
down and deep, into our bones, ah, but to have,  
that __**one**__ thing._

_It is to know the depravity of the world, by being it.  
It is to be the depravity of the world,  
and yet - still - to smile._

_"True joy is possession," Asura says._

-**Madara Uchiha**. _The Book of Nine Rings_.

* * *

Sha Nagba Imuru

* * *

A/N: From now on, quality should increase. I'm finally getting a feeling back for how to write decently. Or at least what I perceive as decently. The two aren't the same thing.

Take Shio's little theory with a grain of salt. Her starting assumptions are wrong.

This chapter was edited by Enbi. Any errors that remain are, as always, my own.


	11. Heterostasis

Silence.

Silence is the song of Totality.

It is the first,

it is the last,

and before the beginning,

and after the end,

it is the_ only_.

The sound of one hand clapping is the limit of the moments before the clap does not. The hand moving through air disturbs the fabric of the sleeve. Slow down. The surface of the hand brushes against air. Slow down. Subaurally, but still in the realm of sound, the slow fires of metabolism burn as a frozen heartbeat roars. Slow down. Finally, on the transcendent precipice of the realm that we call noise, the fine pattering of the photon sleet.

Slow down.

As the moment before nothing approaches, find the limit of time, the moment before the unmoment, the event that marks the beginning of the nonevent.

Find that and listen beneath the planck time, to the subatomic roar of the sea of chaos beneath all space, at the bottom of all scales.

Oh, it is_ fury_.

But it has no sound.

For this is a fury which always and forever cancels itself out. Particle to antiparticle. Principle to antiprinciple. The wheel of dharma spins at all levels of the universe.

Now advance, and behold.

That titanic wall of bound force that a titan calls a hand

an ocean marching through an ocean

violence beyond the imagining of all the minds of humanity hidden in the peace of an utterly fruitless attempt.

_what is the sound of one hand clapping_

And behold, the silence of the world.

This is my best attempt to describe what it was like, to grasp the pattern of the_ Art of the Darkness as_ _the Sun_ created by the Yamanaka, shared with the Nara, and a few others.

It does not capture one ten thousandth of the experience.

To this day, I do not understand how they created it.

But perhaps—just perhaps—that's only the limit of a foreigner speaking a foreign tongue, compared to the inborn grace of a native.

Some questions have no answers.

Too many.

But when all the antecedents are gone, tell me: do they even matter?

* * *

**Five Weeks Prior**

* * *

Sometimes when I wake up, I have trouble remembering who I am.

...I'm sorry. That was out of sequence.

Shio was the sort of person, and one of the few, to whom the term crippling intelligence could honestly be applied. Nine times out of ten, she acted and talked like an adult who happened to possess the body of a six year old. The other time, you'd be reminded of her age by the appearance of youthful naiveté, conceit, or honesty in the middle of a brutally complicated subject, flaring up and dying down like the moment-long collapse of an electroweak star.

Like me, she fit nowhere.

But for all of her intelligence, for all of that simple, innate brilliance, for _all_ of that, trying to explain the functioning of Resian Math to her was like trying to elucidate Shakespeare to a tape recorder. She could repeat the algorithms every time, but there was just_... no_ understanding. At all.

This at last confirmed something I had suspected in the first days after my encounter with the other Breaker: The only reason that I could understand any of this world's logic was because, as the Shinigami had put it, I had accreted one of this world's souls.

When I gave up trying to explain only three days in, I didn't know which one of us was more relieved. Shio accepted my excuse—the lack of a common basis—with some grace, and our sessions turned to learning the language of this world.

This did not progress evenly.

As for the_ Art_, the scroll I had been given was at best mystical, and at worst a thing that strode the screaming edge of agnosia. Having asked Shio for a clearer explanation of what it actually meant, her reply followed:

"I can't, Akino-san."

I opened my eyes, and discarded even the pretence of meditation. "Can't? Is it a clan secret, or...?"

Shio shook her head. "Nothing like that. Just... while I could explain what_ I_ would do, it wouldn't be the same as what you_ need_ to do. It might work, it might not, but it would never be as good, and once you learnt it, you wouldn't be able to find the right way to reapportion your chakra."

I stared down at the tiny scroll in my hand. So. Instead of instructions, it was a map. Instead of directions, it was a description of all possible paths. A phase space.

"Interesting," was all I said, as I closed my eyes and focused anew.

* * *

It was some days later that I began to understand the periphery of what the_ Art_ discussed. I was still very far from the gnosis of it; however, and since it was beginning to look like I was—to my_ eternal_ shame—not going to effortlessly master it like the supergenius I wasn't (and more importantly, since it looked like I was probably going to end up taking longer than Shio had) we began to talk about what exactly the requirements for getting into the Elite string were.

"I'm almost certain its some kind of specific event," I said, "Some way of testing the specific attributes they look for in people destined for actual shinobi work and not simple fighting capacity. A crucible. More diffuse testing doesn't make sense, because the content of the classes..."

I trailed off. How was I suppose to say that nothing that we did would have remotely prepared us for actual wetwork?

Shio seemed to guess at what I was leading towards, in any case. "I agree," she said, as she leant against one of Training Ground 27's trees, and drew abstractions in the dirt with what I assumed was an extension of chakra out of her feet. Somehow, she managed to look at both the diagram and me at the same time. "Nothing that we've done so far even touches on that sort of thing. You can't find talent without an audition."

I considered ignoring the word choice at the end there, out of place as it was coming from the mouth of a clan child, and sighed internally.

Konoha, if it could be likened to anything in Terra Res, was like Sparta. The arts existed, but they were considered an amusing indignity. Whatever else was true, Shio casually using a bit of playacting-related terminology was_ weird_.

And of course, I had to ask the question, because I couldn't even guess at the answer.

"Audition?" I lifted a single brow.

A small puff of dust from the foot drawing the diagrams accompanied the inquiry, and Shio blushed furiously, lost focus, and hid her face all in the same moment. She mumbled something that was absolutely incoherent.

I could drop it. It would be appropriate.

...nah. We used Japanese language and followed some of the cultural mores, but sophisticated circumspection wasn't a typical civilian trait, and whatever else was true, I was supposed to be an orphan raised in that culture.

Beside which, and more importantly, I was curious.

"I'm sorry?" I said, keeping my expression innocent.

"...I like Kabuki, all right?"

Error; insufficient excuse. "I... don't really follow," I said.

"_Acting._"

Ah. The abstract representation of Yamanaka Shio in my mind shifted, slightly. Kabuki was male only. And where that taboo might have stopped other[lesser] people in and of itself...

The question was, how—? I understood.

"Henge?" I asked. Shio nodded, face still scarlet. I considered for a moment, then nodded. "Cool."

She looked up, hands lowering, her eyes wide, but steady. "You don't care?"

This was venturing into territory that seemed dangerously like bonding.

"Did King Leopold the Fourteenth care when Anaximenes invaded Turkmenistan?" The correct answer to that question was _Mu_, which was also the correct answer to Shio's question.

As the admixture of hope and mortification gracing Shio's face transformed into confusion, I all but subvocalized a slightly less correct answer. "No, I don't care. Of course I don't care."

Seeing people walk an other path than that expected for them; _that_ was beauty. To condemn it was to praise stagnation for the source of all that was good in the world. _Madness_.

Blatantly, I tore the conversation back onto the original topic. "Anyway, yeah. Given that I"—by which I meant Kazu—"haven't heard anything at all about some kind of blatant test in my own investigation, I think it's safe to say it's likely a hidden aspect of some other training exercise. It's probably held multiple times, too, so nobody with potential is missed. Actually..." I trailed off, as I assessed an idea that had just occurred to me.

It wasn't crazy.

"Actually," I continued, "I'd bet that even someone who succeeds too late to become an elite manages to make it there once they enter active duty. You know of any members of the main forces getting crosspromoted into an elite group?"

"I thought of that, too," Shio replied, a light blush still colouring her cheeks, but otherwise recovered. "And yes. One of my cousins in another branch house might've. But... he's dead."

_Damn_, I thought. "Sorry," I said.

Shio made a dismissive gesture.

"I never knew him, and it was a good death. Nothing to be sorry about."

A good death. _Hah. _I smiled, tightly. The cultural gap between this place and Terra Res was so wide, it was morbidly refreshing. But still, the things we could've learned...

_Irrelevant_, I thought.

Well, unless I figured out how to summon the dead. Shinigami had all but implied that something of the deceased lived on.

No way that was in the Academy library, though.

"Well," I said, finally, "That's basically the limits of my knowledge. Yours?"

Shio shrugged. "I haven't found anything else. The main house won't answer any of our questions—they don't want any branch members actually being exposed to higher-risk missions."

"But they're okay with the heir?" I asked.

Shio shook her head. "I can't talk about it."

I raised my hands, "All right, no problem. I don't want to step on anything sensitive."

Shio nodded, looking slightly worried, then closed her eyes, smoothed her features, and continued. "I've wanted to get into the academy archives to find out who the transfer students are discreetly, but I didn't have anyone who could act as a lookout." She paused for a moment, then added, "Qualifier: Nobody I trusted to."

If that wasn't a clear invitation... "When I get back in," I said, "I'd be happy to help."

I'd be a fool not to be.

* * *

_But of course I was a fool already. Who manipulates should take care, lest they be manipulated in turn._

_To _**wit**_. Shared. Confidences._

_As a rule, Yamanaka were good at psychology. And its application._

* * *

Later that day, after I had lost the ability to be still enough to meditate, I walked back to the orphanage as the sun set. Alone, fortunately. Street vendors milled about, smiling and hawking their wares to the thinning flow of civilians. The faint scent of cooking meat spilled out of an alley. Glancing down it, I saw an enthusiastic crowd, most of whom were holding what looked like very small shish-kebabs.

Yakitori.

_My_, I thought,_ but this brings back memories_. I had five ryō, which was ridiculously little money, and was the result of about two months of errantly picking up the things for no real reason at all. They were far rarer than currency of similar value had been in real life, when Resian society still used money, but given how far this world was from postscarcity, it was only to be expected.

I hoped it would be enough.

Walking down the alley provoked sense-memories of a certain street in Yokosuka, where, in an alley like this one, the same food had been sold.

How delightfully absurd that people still converged on the same concepts even in universes so far removed. Same species, different physics; same taste, different worlds.

Ducking my way through the crowd, I came to a stop, glancing up at the handwritten sign. 2 ryō per.

Fuck it. If I wasn't going to enjoy anything, I might as well be dead.

Grabbing two skewers, I deposited the price in the collection box as the proprietor watched me carefully. Grudgingly—_did I really look _**that**_ shabby?_—he nodded, and turned his attention to others in the crowd as I navigated my way out of the tightly-packed throng and got back on to the main street.

As I ate, entrusting the fine art of not bumping into anyone to a process that was more than unconscious and less than aware, my thoughts turned from the world that had been to the world that was, and in particular, to one Yamanaka Shio—and the matter of how to properly betray her.

When everything was done, I needed her to feel enough antipathy towards me to not want anything to do with me, but at the same time, not enough to cause her to seek me out from hate, or to damage any necessary cooperation. This was optimal. It reduced her to part of the background noise that most other people were in my life. There, she would be in no more danger from the Breaker than anyone else.

If she was an ordinary child, this would have been easy. But she was smarter than anyone I had cared to associate with, in my first life. Simple patterns would _not_ work.

What complicated matters even further, though, was that she was part of a clan—and ultimately, it was the _clan_ that was helping me. Indirectly, to be certain, and the_ Art of Darkness as the Sun_ was actively shared with the Nara and other associates—but I had to be careful. I had to choose not only the means, but the moment. An excuse. Something that Shio, and _only_ Shio would take personally, and that would exonerate me in the eyes of others. Especially the Yamanaka clan.

I took another bite of the meat as I drew to a halt, staring into nowhere.

This was going to be substantially more complex than I first thought. Subtlety wasn't something I did. My planning style, such as it was, was to sow as much confusion as possible and to do to unthinkable blatantly, trusting in that fact that my actions_ made no sense_ to hide my motives or responsibility. Subtly implicating myself was_ not_ one of my strengths.

...It was at that point that I noticed I had finished the first skewer in its entirety without even noticing the flavour. Words cannot express the sheer existential horror I felt up learning this, but I—I'll try to write this down.

_Mild disappointment_.

"Damn it," I muttered in english, and channeled some of my broken chakra into my hand with not too much difficulty. The empty skewer disintegrated into glittering black dust that rapidly became far too small for the eye to see.

I started walking again, slowly pathing my way back to the orphanage, and for the moment, banishing all thought about the tears I needed to make this end in. For the moment, I just didn't have enough information to even begin to plan—only enough to estimate the scope of what I needed to accomplish.

A work of art.

The second skewer was_ delicious_.

* * *

Sleep didn't come easily.

* * *

But eventually it comes for us all.

As always, I dreamed.

A ziggurat presiding over a field of wheat. Tortured amber skies. It was sunset, the sun yet unset. In the distance, the mirage of a forest composed of the same tree repeated two to the aleph-zero times marched to the limits of eternity. Across it all, and in silence the wind drew patterns, sourceless and without meaning.

A hand held a cup of wine, and didn't. I turned my back on the scene, and looked into the ziggurat as I looked out of it. I beheld a man in white clothes sitting on a clay throne, and saw the callow girl staring at me from beyond the rectangle that cut the inside of this domain from the outer world.

"Who—" I questioned the man on the throne.

"— are you?" I finished, asking this question of the girl.

Understanding came from both paradigms at once, and we screamed—

* * *

I woke up, and for a moment, didn't know who I was—which one was real. I recognised nothing, I couldn't remember anything, I was—I was—  
And then the confusion subsided, and I recognised_ where_ this was.

"Oh." Voice cracked, hands shaking.

The orphanage in Konohagakure no Sato.

I was being Akino Kaede.  
I was Akino Kaede.

I held one trembling hand to my face, covered my eyes, and sighed.

_They will never forgive you_, a part of me said.

_Error: Null Referent,_ the larger part replied.

I rolled out of my bunk, and landed on the floor, absorbing the shock fluidly. Nobody else was left in the dorm. They were working, or begging, or in the academy, then. How long had I slept?

I considered going through the motions of my daily ablutions, but... frankly, bizarrely, for once, I wanted to actually be around other people. So, I turned in another direction and walked downstairs.

It was silent.

When I arrived at the first floor landing, that quietude increased, and... there was nothing. No sound, no incidental noises. Nothing sending in from the streets. None of the aural camouflage of creaking floorboards and inefficient movements that Kazu would have kept up to sell himself as a civilian.

He was gone, then.

That was... Odd.

It didn't fit the established patterns of his behaviour. Something was wrong, and—

Wood groaned behind me. I turned.

And saw the last person I wanted to see in the world. I didn't scream, or shout, I just turned, took two steps of the beginning of a dead sprint—and ran right into the person that had formerly been right behind me.

"You know—" he said, tone conversational, as the seal on my back screamed to life in a language of bloodlust and imperative. I_ fought_ not to lunge for him. "—running away is, well, I appreciate the gesture. But it's pretty pointless. How are you, Kaede?"

"Alive," I replied through grit teeth, as I slowly mastered the seal's urge.

"Really?" He said, tone interested and face utterly blank. "_Fascinating_. Care to tell me why you've dropped out to become a nobody? If this is your way of trying to accelerate things, well," He laughed, or, no. Calling it a laugh would be a lie.

He made a sound that replicated every detail and quality of laughter, and only made that sound. Neither his face or body moved at all, beyond the barest amount necessitated by that facsimile, by the air pushed through his lungs, the bellows, and the vibrating reed that informed the pattern of voice. And not one epsilon more.

"It isn't going to work. You need to get your head in the_ game_. I want a_ challenge._ Or, well, as much of one as you can provide. Otherwise—"

He made a slashing gesture, and the air parted to reveal somewhere else—and someone I knew from an earlier life.

Snow in Prague.

A conversation.

Heartbreak, but not mine.

Involuntarily, I whispered, "Annaliese—"

Then, he pointed a finger at her and—

—

—

—on my knees, sobbing, an acrid, sour taste in my mouth, vomit on the floor.

A pair of leather shoes filled the upper quadrant of my vision, and I heard that leather subtly creak, the only sound as the other Breaker crouched down.

"You see." He said. It was not a question. "My path. Or no path. Do what I_ want_. Understand." None of those statements were questions.

To that, to all of this, I could only say one thing. Perhaps it was because of my resolution, weeks ago, to break myself in the destruction of this thing shaped like a man. Perhaps it was because of what I had just been shown—painful, too painful, gods and fire _why_—pushing me far beyond the edge of reason, or sanity. Perhaps there was no real reason at all, and this was merely what the person called Akino Kaede had to say to remain herself.

Regardless, it was said: "_Disgusting._"

The Breaker twitched. "Excuse me?" His voice was quiet, calm, and utterly level.

"Absolutely," I said, forcing myself to enunciate the word and focus on nothing of what had come just moment before. "_Disgusting_. Unnecessary bullshit trash unaesthetic _hack_ I swear to goddamn_ from thus_ I will_ end_ you—"

"What—" The Breaker began again—but I wasn't done.

"Hadn't given up you incompetent_ piece of shite._ Paid any real attention at all you would know that I was working on fixing a problem that prevented me from becoming Shinobi."

I stood up, furiously wiped the tears from my eyes and looked the faceless man in his own. They were... empty. Broadcasting. Transmitting the idea of_ here is the window to my soul_, and utterly bereft of anything like one.

"_So to be_** entirely**_ honest,"_ I said in English, "_I am going to destroy you. So said, thus is it inevitable. Now please, tear off my limbs again, begin torturing me, or whatever the fuck. One day, you'll make a mistake, and I will_** burn**_ you out of the_** world**_."_

I waited.

And absolutely nothing happened.

The Samsara Breaker stared into my eyes, with a stillness so cold it was inhuman. It was not the stillness of a living thing. It was not the stillness of stone. It was the stillness of a machine that had drawn down, finally, and for the last time.

That moment bled across what seemed like hours, and then reality stuttered, and Kazu dropped a frying pan, swearing loudly.

"Kaede, what the hell!?"

I looked down.

The vomit was gone. Mutatis mutandis, all the other traces, too.

"...remember that karmic demon I told you about?"

"Yeah?" He said, the implied question being,_ and what does this have to do with you appearing from thin air?_

"It was just here."

So saying, I walked out of the building, leaving a pale-faced spy behind me.

* * *

⎝SNI⎞

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Resian**  
Adjective. Def. _Of or pertaining to the world which contains the Earth of Kaede's origin._

**Mu**  
An answer given to certain questions some eastern philosophical traditions, mostly Buddhist. Not being anything more than a casual observer of said, I can't give a full translation, but the core meaning is that the question is so fundamentally flawed that it should be redacted/unasked.

**2^ℵ0**  
ℵ1. (Conjectured.) These are numbers used to measure the cardinality of infinite sets. ℵ0 denotes a set for which a specified algorithm can iterate all members. The set of all non-negative integers is an example of such a set, and the algoithm is simply:

n = 0. Add n as a member of the set. Add 1 to n. Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4.

Aleph-One is a larger form of infinity, for which there is no algorithm that can enumerate all members of the set.

I've taken some liberties in this entry in the interest of not writing thousands of words.

* * *

Notes.

Enbi beta'd this chapter, and you'd better believe that any errors left are mine.


	12. keep on keeping on

_When you value nothing, nothing can be lost._

_There are worlds where this tale is nothing more than fiction. And in that context, some might wonder if it was not a bit unrealistic, the way I reacted to being reborn._

_Some would rejoice, some would curse their fate, but most, if put into my specific situation, if put in contact with a fictional world and a fictional god, would suffer from at least some form of denial. No matter how small._

_But I couldn't._

_I never really believed in the irreality of what I wrote._

_From the very beginning, I believed that everything was true._

_That when we write a story, we are not—we are_** absolutely**_ not—creating fiction._

_But recording—however imperfectly—the truth of another world._

_So when I met a figure that I had once seen in a manga, when I perceived that meeting, it was the confirmation of a long held belief. The proof of a dead ideal. When I had the knowledge of where I was taken from me, the world was still, in its way, unsurprising in its existence._

_No. If anything had the power to move me, it should have been waking up after I was dead, but—well, I just wasn't capable, at that moment, of appreciating the miracle of a restored and unbounded life._

**Humana non sum, nisi mutatio. It meant nothing.**

* * *

**mors delenda est**

* * *

The Samsara Breaker knew who I was.

I had hoped that I was wrong—there were many, _many_ worlds when the Breaker could have gotten its clothes; even it knowing my name could have just just been a supernatural skill, or at worst (I had hoped) incidental contact.

It wasn't.

It knew who I was. It knew enough to target one of my oldest friends. One of the only people whom I had ever genuinely regarded as such. One of the few people that I had been relieved to see join the Transcension.

It _knew_.

That knowledge very nearly drove me to the beyond of sanity, and yet, it wasn't for the first time. I had lived in a world where everything was wrong before. I had hidden the fact that I was living in a world where everything was wrong before.

It's never about how you feel. It's only about what they see. I had succeeded, all those years ago—and experience was the mother of competence.

Beyond a few questioning looks Shio threw at me in the days following the Breaker's return, the rest of the second week passed without incident as I slowly managed to ratchet my paranoia back down to something resembling rational thought.

I didn't know if that had really been Annaliese. That was the lie I had told myself, all day, every day, and it wasn't nearly enough, as whatever dim humanity I had regained evaporated away under the force of that singular experience. If I didn't act—If I didn't run through a list of tasks that likely ended in something worse than death, I would see—

I would see—

My mind failed me, and it didn't matter. Past/present/future, as far as I was concerned, Anna was dead. I _couldn't_ know if this was some perverse illusion, or her actual fate. It _didn't matter_. The bottom line was, it was intolerable. A violation. I couldn't have chosen something worse if I had been torturing myself.

Oh yes. The Breaker _knew_ me.

Sleep became my enemy.

It wasn't nightmares. Nightmares were something I had only suffered rarely, in my childhood, and something I had lost with adulthood. '_Think the unthinkable._' I had once said those words, and believed in them, what was implied was that you had _better _be doing it calmly.

Fear was something I knew very well. _Terror_, I had burned out of my soul.

Even then, it wasn't for any deeply rational reason. _Hardly_. Although I had been living this life more like an algorithm than a person, my second encounter with my enemy had _moved_ me.

During the first few decades of my original life, I had _hated_ sleep. The concept of spending a third of my life in what could charitably be described as catatonic delirium had _revolted_ me, nearly as much as the concept of death itself. It had underlined, and _emphasised_ that whatever else was true, _we were not made for ourselves._

We were just survival machines that our genes rode on. No god would have given mortal creations the ability to understand their demise.

But then, no good god would have made something that could die, anyway.

And the _world_ could die.

And it had.

No. We were not made for ourselves. The world itself was a refutation of that. Sleep was just a final insult.

Fear did not break me from the cycle of day and night. But I couldn't suppress the sense that in finite time, I had not accomplished _enough_. Instead of sleeping with the sun, I slept when I could no longer _think_. It probably cost me progress, if anything, but at that point, if I had done anything else, I would have ended up being even less productive. I knew _how_ to go to sleep even if I had a thousand nagging concerns, but to do that, I had to _want_ to.

And I didn't. What I wanted was to inflict one ten thousandth of what the other Breaker had inflicted on me back onto him, and then maybe to tear apart causality and unmake the truth of what he had done.

I more or less ceased to live in the orphanage, treating it more as a place to eat than anything else.

Most times I slept in the training field, under the sun, or the stars.

Shio was an irregular island in the balance. Often, she was the one that woke me up. I have no doubt she realised what I was doing, but the remarkable thing about people is that if you act is if absolutely nothing is wrong and answer their questions with a smile, a shrug, and a casually apropos dismissal, they stop asking.

Some of them even stop caring.

I doubted Shio was one of that type, but at the same time, her interest was genuinely harmless. The truth was so far beyond the context of this world that I thought it nearly impossible that she would find it.

The third week came and went, and slowly, _slowly_, I was able to begin returning to those eternal moments where I had seen one of the few people I had ever cared for destroyed, and render them to nothing, piece by screaming piece.

* * *

The fourth week.

Calm was not the word for what I had regained. Deadness was more appropriate. Nevertheless, I found myself capable of reaching the boundary of ego death once more, and with it, the ever encroaching precipice of the _Art_. It began with being able to sense more than just the presence of my chakra, but the components of it, and continued in looking into _those_, and seeing the eddies and flows within them.

As I gained that fine sense of something that had never been a part of the quantum worlds, I had also—_finally_—been able to wholly trust the part of me that was Akino Kaede when it came to this world's common sense.

I was very, very far away from being able to see with insight, but I had finally crossed the boundary of being able to truly learn.

(_Even so, it was nothing less than a miracle. At the time I regarded it as an accomplishment, and felt a faint echo of satisfaction. Now? Now, I understand that had I _**not**_ attained that ability, there is almost no chance I would still be alive._

_There are other definitions of life than a heartbeat. Some of them far more important than the same._)

Having crossed that invisible rubicon, some things that I had accepted as impossible became simple. At once, I found I could keep track of inordinately long numbers, as long as they were abstract. The trick of it was thinking to the conceptual left of what I thought of as numbers, and into the domain of what I thought of as numbers, where the first part of me was the Resian, and the second the Shinobi.

The fact that it was no easier to do the Resian form of higher math on them was depressing, but not unexpected. Hyperoperation didn't exist in this world, after all, and even if it had, there was no good reasons for humans to be able to use it.

I itched to test the limits of the ability, but, well, as always. That was for after I destroyed the Breaker. Now?

Now, I was learning how to throw Kunai.

...yes. So.

Kunai.

I admit, the idea just doesn't sound that exciting, but it turned out that there was depth in bukijutsu that I had simply never been able to appreciate. As always, it tied back to my inability to trust the instincts that had come with being Kaede.

I had just assumed that the old way was right, and it wasn't until I idly borrowed Shio's kunai one day, intending to dismember branches from a tree as if it had sold military secrets to the evil, bad, terrible [_insert favoured enemy country here_], that I learned otherwise.

_Thunk_. A branch plummeted, and a kunai followed with a dull clatter. Shio's eyes narrowed.

_Snick_. A twig fell, as the kunai I had thrown returned to the earth.

Idly, as Shio watched me, I made the last weapon I held dance between my fingers, then let it fly at the smallest branch yet.

It missed.

I sighed, and at the same time as I set out to retrieve the weapons, Shio cleared her throat and said, "Kaede? What the_ hell_ was that?"

And man oh_ man_ did she sound displeased. Turning to look at her, I beheld an expression that could best be described as bewildered disgust.

"Throwing?" It wasn't a statement.

Shio shook her head. "No. That was ballistics. Taken to a level that I've never seen before, but—" Shio closed her eyes, pinching her nose, and mouthed something. Perhaps the local equivalent of '_Lord save me from fools._'

"When Ueda-sensei showed us how to throw kunai, did you notice the slight—" Shio mimed the throw, emphasising the overcomplex snapping motion at the end of the throw.

"Well, um, yeah, but—"_ 'I taught myself how to throw knives in my previous life because I was bored when I was eighty six_. _I know my technique is good!_' seemed like a bad finish to that sentence. I sighed. "What am I doing wrong?"

"Beyond throwing like a machine? Absolutely nothing. But humans aren't machines—" I opened my mouth to object that qualia did not exempt us from the laws of physics, then remembered that chakra existed, which was basically magic, and that souls existed, which was basically bullshit, and shut it with an audible click—"and there are better ways to do throwing. Nothing close to as universal, but—Kaede,_ try_ what you saw in class before dismissing it?"

I had this small feeling that I should trust Shio here, if by small you meant screaming certainty, and if by trust you meant to take on faith.

"Can you show me the motion? Slowly?"

Shio sighed, but did so.

At this point, simple description breaks down. In the Quantum Worlds, when you apply force to something, the only way to determine the final result is in the application. You move your arm to throw, and if you want to, say, change the aerodynamic profile of what you're throwing, you can perhaps impart a spin by applying force in the correct place to give the projectile angular momentum.

That worked here, too.

But with the correct handling technique, you could alter the behaviour of force _directly_. On Terra Res, what Shio demonstrated would have turned a correct throw into a fumble. In the Shinobi Rikugou, it created a technique—the basic kunai throw—that gave her kunai efficiency that could _not_ be explained within the brute physical limits of her body.

...at the time, I just saw what should have been a botched throw neatly bisect the twig I had failed to hit, at a speed that the half of me I was learning to ignore screamed was inconsistent with reality.

After having Shio repeat the gesture a few more times, I repeated the motion slowly myself, and got the general gist of it_ remarkably_ fast. There was just something about it that felt_ right_.

Finally, I did it with the kunai directly.

Aim. Acellerate arm. Release, twisting the hand, making sure the ring finger is the last to touch the body of the—

My arm stopped cold, effortlessly, and the Kunai shot off into the foliage impossibly fast. And in that moment, I understood, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

_Holy shit._

There were other things, other parts of the technique, which increased accuracy and so forth, but they hardly mattered. I was dropping the excess momentum in my arm into the kunai at the moment of release. The core of the manipulation was that simple, and that impossible.

...well, obviously not impossible. Shio had done it, and I was beginning to pick it up. But still.

It had been the math that had made me realise how alien the world was. But _this_... A chill ran down my spine.

On Terra Res, if an asteroid had hit the world, the results would have been apocalyptic. Here...

Here, I suspected that if it hit _in the right way_, it could do nothing more than just slightly _nudge_ the orbit, while doing no damage to the point where it landed _whatsoever_.

Fortunately, I had already had my mandatory episode of collapsing into a gibbering mess back when I first met the other Breaker. I was able to control myself this time, although my next throw went embarrassingly wide.

My next attempt bisected the target perfectly.

* * *

The next day, I found myself alone. Shio was spending the hours after the end of class investigating the course schedule. It was unpublished, but we were hoping that the older students might know something about it, assuming dates weren't shuffled every year. It was a longshot, as that sort of disruption would make for better opsec, and knowledge could be compartmentalised in ways that made changing the schedule trivial; but at the moment it was the only path we had forward until I could get back into the academy. The only reason I wasn't there helping her was that—for the moment—I had no right to even enter academy grounds.

And so I found myself walking through the wooded areas of Training Ground 27, measuring the world without units.

Before we had parted ways the day before, Shio had pronounced my throwing technique sufficiently passable for self-training but that "going any further would be impossible. You'll need to bullseye a target at ten jō before you're even at the level of dead last, and that can't be done without chakra."

To which I had nodded and thanked her. It was faster than explaining why she was wrong. Regardless of the deeper laws of reality, this universe was in three dimensions of space, and the fifth axiom was true. That meant certain properties held.

I might not be able to get the full experience, but to simulate the distance, all I had to do was measure how much of my visual field a given target took up at a distance that I couldn't reach, and to cut targets that took up the same amount of subjective space _inside_ my throwing radius.

After finding a branch of similar size to what I had hit yesterday and walking what I estimated was thirty metres away—about ten jō, and thank the_ gods_ I had memorised traditional Japanese units for this Naru—

Nar—

N—

For some fanfic project back in 2018 that I had started before creative narrow intelligences made stories so ubiquitous that nobody was reading anything not customised for their individual tastes.

I slowly suppressed a frisson of _very_ old bitterness. Shaking my head to return to the present, I pulled out a fuda pen that I had borrowed from Kazu_,_ and held a length of string as close to my left eye as it could get without touching, then marked the string where the edges of the branch were.

After I had that mark, cutting targets that took up the appropriate amount of visual arc _within_ my throwing distance was, well, not easy (I ruined something like twenty branches before I got one to within an acceptable margin of error), but far better than just waiting to master the _Art_, which was very much an all-or-nothing proposition.

Next, I cut down a young sapling, an action which might have been gauche in my original world, and was something more like pest control here. One of the Chunin at the academy had taught that the Shodaime Hokage had grown these trees. Manipulated them too. Just—for a moment, imagine fireproof deciduous trees that grow like bamboo.

Pretty neat, all told.

_Slight_ problem, though. The flame retardant properties of those trees had died with the First. The growth had only slowed, and that, barely. In a country that produced more fire-affinity ninja than any other. _Yes_. Thank you Hashi-chan.

All right. I probably _was_ being unfair, but even the living can't be hurt by malapportioned derision so long as you don't act on it.

After making about five targets the difficult way, with a kunai not at all suited for woodworking, I started looking for something a _bit_ more efficient. My chronic and inborn disinterest in inefficiency—viewed less charitably, laziness—led to an interesting discovery.

My chakra was caustic to dead things. This, I had already known. Every time I had used it before, it had destroyed those things utterly. Finally, I considered _why_ that was the case._ Perhaps_, I thought, as I sat, thinking about how to solve the problem of mass-producing targets, _that was only because there was so much of it_.

After all, if it was a feedback loop, like fire, I should be able to destroy a good portion of the training ground setting my feet to the ground and channelling some energy through them - soil _was_ dead things. And chakra unbalance was enough of a problem that the Yamanaka had created the _Art_ specifically to counter it. If it really was a feedback loop, I couldn't imagine it being anything but well known.

I decided restructuring the local countryside was a vanishingly small probability, and satisfied that nothing bad would come of some direct experimentation, I cut a branch from the sapling I had felled, and concentrated my chakra into my free hand.

Carefully, I lightly tapped the branch. Nothing. I put my finger to it._ Still_ nothing.

It wasn't enough to really invalidate the idea, though. Plants died slowly, and if it was alive, I couldn't do anything to it, just like I couldn't even do anything to myself. Although I did wonder why the bark hadn't been destroyed. Some deeper principle I wasn't seeing, perhaps?

Fortunately, dead branches weren't in anything like short supply. I grabbed one, and tapped it. The area that I had touched began to desubstantiate, but after a moment, the process stopped.

I sighed. _Honestly_. And here I was, claiming the pretense of intelligence, when it took me weeks to figure something like this out!

_Ah, well,_ I thought, _its not like I would've been able to put it to use until now, anyway._

There really were very few direct applications of destroying recently(?) dead things, and I had this sneaking suspicion that it would be of very little use in the field. My enemy wasn't just alive, after all. He was an outside context problem.

I set out to gather as much dead wood as I could. Figuring this out, learning to control it might count for nothing.

But if I failed, then fine control over this, my one supernatural power, might be all I ever had.

I had best start developing it.

* * *

**S_N_I**

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Jō**  
Traditional Japanese unit of measure roughly equal to 3 meters. Used globally in the Shinobi Rikugou outside of Onyou Philosophy and (to a much lesser extent) the Hidden Villages.

**Creative Narrow Intelligences**  
A form of AI capable of doing one type of creative activity. Some prototypes have existed since the mid-00s. It is expected that the first of these at parity with humans will come to exist in the mid-20s, and that a few years after that, they will have automated creativity. Writer CNIs, for example, will probably end up replacing us authors (why pay a human to write when you can just pay electricity costs instead?). Yep. It sucks.

**Hyperoperation**  
A way of extending the pattern of operations, letting you look at them as a sequence, they let you talk about what comes before addition and after exponentiation.

Successor, is the first, and comes one operator before addition and means "take this number and add one to it". ("Before successor" or "Hyper -1" is meaningless because the only thing you can finally remove is "and add one to it", which leaves just, "Take this number, and do nothing to it" or less redundantly "Take this number" or "this number" or "number".)

Addition is the second, and means, "Take this number, and apply successor x times".

Multiplication is the third, and means "Take zero, and apply addition to it x times, using this y as the input (Ex: 2*3 = 0 + (3 + 3) = 0 + (1 + (1 + (1 + (1 + (1 + (1 )))))) = 6)".

Exponentiation does multiplication the same way multiplication does addition.

Tetration is the next, followed by Pentation, etc. There are as many hyperoperators as there are integers, and they're generally a very nice shorthand for stupidly huge numbers.

As a demonstration: let's say # means tetration, and ^ is exponentiation because FFNET doesn't let you do superscript formatting. Then 3 # 4 = 3^(3^(3^3)) = 3^(3^27) = 3^7,625,597,484,987 = There is not enough information in the universe to store that number in decimal form.

For an idea of how hideously large that number is, consider that diameter of the entire observable universe is about 3^129.385 planck lengths. Planck lengths are the smallest unit of distance that are physically meaningful, incidentally. Smaller than that, and space can no longer be measured because it's structure becomes chaotic. So, this is the largest number of units wide the observable universe can (sensibly) be. This number is approximately equal to 35,370,553,733,215,749,514,562,618,584,237,555,997,034,634,776,827,523,327,290,883. Multiply that number by 3, oh, just 7,625,597,484,858 more times, and you're there!

**The Fifth Axiom**  
Imagine a straight line. Now imagine a point to either side. Draw a line parallel to the first line that intersects that point. The Fifth Axiom is that only one line through that point will run parallel to the first line, and that all other lines will intersect. This idea was developed by Euclid, as a geometrical truth that defines the relation of objects both in the perfect, mathematical world, and our own. In universes where this isn't true, life is weird. For example, you can get objects moving at a constant velocity circling other objects forever, like an orbit.

_Uh. _

In truth, The Fifth Axiom was invented because at a human scale, it was true to within the margin of error Euclid could measure. You can't see that the universe is _entirely, totally, absolutely, _non-euclidean until you either have a telescope powerful enough to see the cosmos proper, or are Albert Einstein. But it is. No, noneuclidean geometries are _not_ eldritch horrors. We live in them.

* * *

Notes.

This chapter was bet read by Enbi. I am not a malamute. Any errors that remain though? Mine.

There are some review replies this time.

**God of None**

Thanks! I do try to portray my SI accurately; even when it isn't pleasant. Thanks for reviewing!

**Anon-45**

Oh nice! I hope the extended prologue hasn't been too much of a drag for you. It's going to be over soon, I very nearly have everything set up. Thanks for leaving a review!


	13. you are the pieces

Perhaps it was a truth.

Perhaps a memory.

In the end, it didn't matter.

In the end, it was all equivocation.

That was the way this world worked.

That was the truth at long last uncovered.

Math _feels._

_Numbers_ feel.

And those feelings can be precisely quantised,

and eliminated.

Changing the output of that system not at all.

* * *

█▟▚▜▌ ▓▉░▙▁▆ **-Terra Res - Time Indeterminate**

* * *

She woke up, and opened her eyes to the World.

_My site_, she wrote with a saccade of her eyes, and the display reconfigured itself, rotating through several higher dimensions to display those parts of the World - once, decades ago, called the internet—that concerned her.

Two novels, a visual novel, a game, hundreds of posts on dozens of forums.

Zero views. Zero comments. Zero replies. Nobody cared about stories written by others. Nobody cared about insights found by others. Nobody cared about things thought by others. Humanity had sought to automate everything, and at last, they succeeded.

This was not a world where tyranny had won. This was a world where it was irrelevant. This was a world where every system had been honed to perfection, but for the people embedded within them. A world where power had no point, or purpose.

The supreme alienation that all mankind had always sought for: at last grasped, and obtained.

Thus, Nietzsche's worst nightmare: reality. For this was the world of the Last Man.

All this seen, and thought in a moment. Nothing changed. Not on her face, or in her mind, or in her heart. She was not the ubermensch who would fix the world.

There was no such figure.

And there never would be.

_Keyboard, virtual, _she saccaded, and began to type another chapter of a book that no one would ever read.

The posts to the World were years old. Decades.

She had written millions of words since then.

And not a single one would ever be seen.

In the corner of her eye, a notification pulsed unread. Had she opened it, she would have seen a simple headline: "_We are leaving._"

But it wasn't time for that. Not yet.

But soon.

And then she would never write another word.

* * *

**Now**

* * *

Over the course of the next week, I edged closer to understanding the _Art_, and felt like I made no progress on it at all. I never really had been cut out for mysticism, and that one of the things I needed most was locked in a cage made of it was beginning to seem like a particularly bitter joke.

At least I could measure my progress in _some_ things. My control over my unbalanced chakra improved by leaps and bounds. I wasn't going to be a sculptor in the near future, but I could at least produce any sufficiently amorphous wooden shape to serve for target practice, and so equipped, my kunai technique improved to the point that Shio had me start on shuriken, citing the need for a better teacher, and Chakra, because_ everything _**always**_ comes back to Chakra_.

The sheer _frustration_ that I felt as that thought passed was enough to jolt me out of the meditative fugue I had been building up to in the five minutes since the last distraction. My mind just was _not_ interested in going further, today.

As it happened, Shio was still there, so—

"—so there was something I was wondering," I began, opening my eyes and putting my attempt to get closer to an everdistant epiphany aside.

"Hm?" Shio looked up from where she had been scratching figures on the ground. Resian algebra?

I guess she hadn't given up, after all.

"When we met, you said I had derived some kind of advanced math. More, that the unbalance between my mental and physical energy was probably because of it. But you also said that unbalanced energy was really common in your family. If that was the case, why aren't most of the Yamanaka..." I trailed off, trying to think of some politic way to finish the question. Luckily, Shio caught my meaning, and absolved me of the need to.

"Like us? Hm..." She trailed off for a moment, mouthing words, then nodded, "That doesn't involve one of our secrets. You'll see the pattern in a lot of yin-based clans. It's breeding, basically. You have people—like you, like me—who have abnormal mental energy when we really shouldn't. I'm the first daughter of my branch to ever have enough mental energy to need our little technique. Most of the time, though, an imbalanced chakra like ours comes from either bad blood—normal yin, not enough yang—or really good breeding—normal yang, _way_ too much yin. In those cases, it doesn't translate to anything special in terms of non-chakra attributes, except for negatives, which is why onyō philosophers have a reputation for being weak of body."

Saying this, she drew a circle in the dirt and labeled it with a _s_ō_sh_ō rendition of _ketsu_, which was the kanji for blood.

Then she drew another circle, intersecting the first, and labeled it _tensai_, which was a compound meaning _prodigy_.

"And then there's us. Our chakra is extraordinary because our minds are extraordinary, not because we were bred that way. I know I wasn't—not for lack of trying, but, well... " Shio trailed off, but it wasn't due to a loss for words. She had clenched her teeth, looking down at the ground. The muscles of her jaw worked for a moment, "We're a branch house for a _reason_," she bit out, leaving me momentarily stunned that she was capable of that much bitterness. And that it had never shown up before.

Shio continued. "The _difference_, is that Chakra is easy to go for. Intelligence? Whole different league. Even the Nara Clan has inconsistent results _at best_." She smiled, and there was something distinctly false about it. "Not to mention that there are more way more… well, _bad_ ways to cause an overflow of mental energy than good ones. Madmen typically have unbalanced mental energy too. So we don't even try breeding for it. But your parents might ha—" She cut herself off so violently that _I_ started.

It took me a moment to figure out what Shio thought she had done, and when I did, I almost laughed. Really, her concern for my feelings was endearing, but, "Shio, my parents being dead is not an issue," I said, "I can't miss what I've never had." _Which, while true, is completely disconnected from the previous sentence. _"It's _useless_."

And that last statement was the actual truth. Feeling pain for the deceased was useless. Counterproductive, assuming it was their choice—and it had been their choice. Cremation, two years before humanity solved immortality, five before we had solved resurrection. Done in full knowledge that those problems were nearly solved.

When someone _**chose**_ to die, _I did not mourn them_. Ever. Anything less would be spitting on their resolve.

Shio stared at me for a long moment, then looked away, muttering something that I couldn't quite catch. "I'm sorry?" I asked.

Shio winced as if embarrassed, but something about it was off. The timing. There was just a moment's hesitation before it had formed. An affectation. _Why? _Then,

"I said, '_Why are you like that?_'"

It took me a moment to replay the conversation to attempt to understand what she meant. Even then, my reply was, "Like what?"

"So—" Shio made a grasping motion with her hand, looked at it askance, then stopped and closed speaking again after a few moments of silence. "I don't understand what could cause someone to be like you, Akino-san. Not with your background. Not at our age."

_Imagine you have watched everything you love die,_ I didn't say, _Imagine that _**you**_ must not_.

And not even for the _want_ to. I didn't want to die. I could not want to die. It was outside what I defined as sanity—and all of this was irrelevant, because it was part of an answer I couldn't speak, if I wanted to keep Yamanaka Shio safe from my enemy.

And I did. Damn me, but I actually cared about the young genius.

So instead of answering directly, I appropriated a bit of Shinobi myth, and started: "Once, the sage was walking down a path, and he met a hunter. The hunter had caught a rabbit, and was gutting it in preparation for dinner. The hunter saw the sage, and said, '_Ah, teacher! Watch my rabbit for me and I will go check my other traps. We shall have a wonderful dinner._'

"The sage nodded, gave his assent, and while the hunter was away, used a secret art to bring the rabbit back to life. '_Flee!_' The sage commanded, '_The hunter wants to eat you!_' Murmuring its thanks, the rabbit fled, the sage followed, and the hunter returned empty handed, to an empty camp, having found his other traps just as empty.

"'_Oh, despair,_' cried the hunter, '_I will go hungry tonight!_'

"Meanwhile, the sage continued down his winding path, feeling neither regret nor remorse for what he had done. Tentatively, the rabbit that he had saved stuck its head out of the bushes to give thanks to its saviour, and the sage reached down with one gentle hand, and gently tore out its soul.

"'_Why!?_' cried the soul of the rabbit, '_You saved me!_'

"The sage shrugged, and sat down to begin cooking his meal.

"'_I also told you to flee_,' The sage said. '_Why did you not listen?_'

"'_I thought you were just,'_ the rabbit protested as it's body cooked, _'for why else would you have saved me!?_'

"_'I am just,_' said the sage, _'for I did save you. But I am also the sage, whose every action is wisdom, and justice, and whose stories shall be told and revered throughout all of time._'

"_'Then why!?_' The soul of the rabbit demanded. '_What is the lesson you seek to teach here? What is the great meaning in this cruelty?_'

"'_That I wasn't hungry when I saved you. That I am hungry now,_' the sage said, and banished the soul of the rabbit to Naraku, for it had annoyed him. The sage finished cooking his meal, ate his stew, and sighed.

"'_Trust is a dead rabbit_,' he said."

The clearing was silent as Shio stared at me disbelievingly.

"So," I said, "What did you learn from that?"

"I..." Shio trailed off, continuing to stare at the spot I had vacated, unmoving.

It was kind of disturbing.

"...trust without need is bad?" She finally guessed, and somehow managed to sound both unsure of her conclusion, and the question itself.

"Usually. But that wasn't really the point of the story." There had been no point, and the answer to her question was that the rabbit should have run away; but when it was caught and killed anew, it made the choice to suffer in that knowledge when it did not need to.

The sage was the monster, but the rabbit was the fool.

Doubtless, given what she had taken from it instead, when I finally betrayed her for the sake of saving her life, she would interpret me as the sage.

_Good,_ a part of me thought, _even though she'd be wrong. _

I wasn't the sage. I was the storyteller. The amoral god who plotted out the trajectory[doom] that all things would follow. I _was_ the philos—my mind caught up to the _true_ meaning of what Shio had said.

The words weren't important.

The lack of understanding _was_. Trust had nothing to do with the question she originally asked. She had asked about my indifference to being an orphan. The fable I had told was a deliberate nonsequitur, but someone actually interested in the question would have _looked_…

A frisson of subtle _wrongness_ coursed through me.

Someone who actually cared about the question wouldn't have found that answer. Trust without need was stupid, but that had _nothing_ to do with the actual subject of discussion. And as such, it wasn't an answer to my question. Just an attempt to guess my password. To move the conversation to the next node. To get me to say more about the true subject of the conversation; and that subject: who I _actually_ was.

It was a strategy I might've employed had I been on the other side of it. It was also a strategy that Shio shouldn't have had the ability to consider, let alone execute—not unless every impression I had of her was part of a lie, and if _that_ was the case, it was still too goddamn _clumsy._

If someone with Shio's intelligence had been lying to me this entire time, the very success of that lie precluded the failure of this exchange. That person would have found a more elegant way.

Those impressions, in turn, _weren't_ a lie, because to lie about brilliance is to _have_ brilliance. Therefore: the tactic was too cynical. Shio was too earnest—naive, even—to consider that sort of manipulation. She really did want my friendship, I was certain of that—and she would have had to have known that I would have seen through... _this_.

And then there was the affected hesitance, before. No, that type of casual but inept manipulation wasn't like Shio at _all_.

And that uncharacteristic bitterness even before that...

I came to a tentative conclusion: the person before me was _not_ Yamanaka Shio.

"This has something to do with why you're so... you?" The person wearing Shio's face asked.

I shrugged. "To a zeroth order approximation." Exponents didn't exist in this world's math. "Take as much time as you need, or don't. The actual answer is bound to disappoint you." I picked up a shuriken and walked past her, as if to begin throwing practice.

I hoped I wasn't wrong, or this would go very, very poorly.

"Hah," The impostor said. It was far more an exhalation then a laugh. "You won't just tell me?"

"Perhaps…" I began, turning around lazily and pressing shuriken to her carotid with no particular intent at all, "You had better tell me who you are first."

Just a _bit_ on edge after the Breaker, you understand.

My casual threat was met with dead silence. Then,

"Hahahahahah! Oh, you _are_ good!" There was a flicker, and a bundle of sticks fell to the ground where the now confirmed impostor had been. She flickered back into existence a little more than three meters away, now facing me, and leered. "Tell me, what gave me away?"

That technique had been the Kawarimi. No te'in. _Fuck_.

Motion was life, weakness was death. All there was was to remain cold, and answer.

"I don't think I will," I said, letting the arm that had held the blade to the impostor's throat fall loosely to my side. "Why on earth would I help an enemy?"

"Is that how you see me? Well, I guess Shio-chan was telling the truth, after all. Pity, pity." She grinned toothily, and there was something disturbingly perverse about it. It was a sour note. Off. Conflicting with everything I knew about my fr—_oh fuck_. No. That was a thought I could not _afford_ to complete. Bonds were a weakness, too.

"Well, if you don't plan to tell me that, I have no reason to stay." The impostor turned to walk away, and for the first time in my life I _tried_ to use the Shinigami's seal. It had been meaningless against the Samsara Breaker, but if I could use it to get some answers here—

Absolutely nothing happened, and I snarled internally. What _use_ was the thing if I couldn't even use it at times like _this!?_

"Oh, one other thing," she said, looking over her—_could be a him,_ I thought—shoulder still wearing Shio's face. "That trick with the shuriken. Well done."

So saying she left, leaving me wondering _what the bloody hell_ she was talking about.

* * *

It was simply done, and so I couldn't believe in its own simplicity. Shio had said she would be here today. I had found someone else in her place. Konoha's security was pathetic—if it wasn't, someone as… open, I suppose, as Fujioka Kazu would never have been able to quietly spy on the village for years on end. It was possible that they were only allowing him to observe them, but my first instinct was that it really was that bad.

Why? Because that was the worst case scenario. And the first rule for entering a situation about which you know very little is to assume that everything which can go wrong already has.

So I had to assume that this was not coincidence. That this had been planned.

If that was so, then how do you replace a thing with it's fake?

By removing the original.

I felt ill. The moment I had accepted Shio's help, I had taken responsibility for her safety. It didn't matter if it was something I had never given voice to—obligation is _obligation_, to be fulfilled in faith, or discharged with death.

I had planned to protect her.

I had thought that I would have time to grow strong enough to fulfill that task.

Instead, I found myself in an empty clearing, the impostor gone, and not a trace of my…

I very carefully did not think friend.

My _acquaintance_. And I assumed the worst case's worst case in the back of my mind, and held it apart from my conscious thoughts, because to even _think_ it whole was to accept my failure.

_Please... don't be dead. Don't let another—_

I had to find her. I had to.

Because if not—

* * *

**Perspective Unclear - Terra Res - 2071 CE**

* * *

A slap did not echo, but was singular. The white that covered everything covered the echoes of all sounds just as it shrouded the world. Time did not exist. Distance did not exist. None of those things were, or mattered in that moment, but the gulf that separated the two even there could have been made of universes and eternities, and still would have found deepness in excess of those words.

All that mattered in the end was the look of uncomprehending hurt on her face.

The other stood, as it always did, alone and apart, a stranger anonymous in a crowd of only two. It had not laid out the blow. It had received it.

She looked at her hand for a long moment, then back up at the stranger.

"You killed her."

"Yes."

"Why? Why _you_," name unspoken, absence spoken like a curse, it did not move. "Why _her_?" Nothing. Perhaps it was only there as a vision, perhaps it wasn't—a fist slammed into it's stomach, and there was the abortion of an impact, a faint crunch as it moved back in the snow.

But not an iota of recognition or pain; physical, emotional, or otherwise.

"Give her back!" She cried to the nothing and the no one, "give her back."

The absence turned, and began to walk away.

"Goodbye, Jess. She told me to tell you she loved you, in the end." It didn't need to turn to see what it's words had done. The other knew that the knife she had drawn now lay on the snow, useless outside of hands that could place it. It knew that she was bent over weeping in earnest.

It knew, and it did not care.

"Isn't it sad?" No one asked, and the broken reciprocity of the statement was answer enough.

It continued, leaving emptiness and misery behind it, as once—and therefore, as always.

* * *

**Now**

* * *

I ran, half of me the cynic and half the naive child. I ran, and watched as I ran, knowing that I had failed and knowing that I could not have possibly failed, knowing that probability conspired against me and knowing that in whatever I set my mind to, I would succeed.

For the first time, I understood what being of two minds about something _meant_, and never had it been so literal. It felt like I was going to burst, felt like I was too small to contain myself, felt like I should just sink to the ground in a ball and wait to die, felt like if I didn't _keep moving_ I was going to die.

_What's happening to me_!? I thought, but not in words, which were only ever a foreign language to my chinese room, but in silent imperative.

_Obvious,_ replied another piece,_ you are failing_ _because you have failed. Symmetry in all things is the only justice there ever was_.

Then, something else entirely: _Strength as unexpected as your weaknesses are trivial,_ the **Breaker's** voice echoed in my head, _I disappoint myself, sometimes. Perhaps I was expecting too much._

I skidded to a halt, looking around wildly for the source, and all the while knowing there had been no source. All in my head. I had been feeling progressively worse, but _damn it!_

_Hallucinosis!?_ Now!?

I froze my rage, and moved it to another layer. Now was not the time.

It was only when I regained control of myself that I realised where I was. What I was standing outside of the Nara-Yamanaka-Akimichi district. The residential sector.

Of course. This—I could work with this. All I had to do was go to Shio's house to start. I took a single step forward, and froze, as I realised something.

I had no idea where Shio lived.

None at all.

I didn't know where she lived. I didn't know what she was interested in beyond what she had shared. I didn't know what she was like beyond how she had chose to prevent herself. I didn't know what had moved her to acting, what had informed her tastes, nor what had _ultimately_ motivated her to seek me out. I didn't know why she had stuck with it, when all I had been was a precipital acquaintance, I didn't—I couldn't—I had never—

It struck me like a revelation from god.

The person I was so frantically searching for.

_**I had no idea who she even was.**_

I was acting like I cared, but… had I ever really cared?

Could I care, when _this_ was all I knew?

_betray her, save her life  
use it, then discard it_

If there was nothing to sever, what difference was there? If I didn't care, then how

could I

_ever_

claim that my choices, past, present, future, had been for the sake of what was _right?_

And even now: wasn't I just acting? Playing out the role of concerned friend to the role of missing companion?

And even then: wasn't I already _failing_?

It didn't matter. I _chose_. Nowm I could make that role a lie or make it truth, but hesitance… _stillness,_ was only death. Even if not for me.

I was a terrible person. No one would dispute that. But sometimes, the inadequate are the only ones left.

"All right," I murmured. "All right." The words were said to nothing. And I took the next step. And then the next. Twenty more, and I stood before the guards posted at the edge of the residential district.

"Excuse me, Chunin-san." The guard nearest to me glanced at me, the only indication I had been acknowledged. "I'm Akino Kaede, an... acquaintance of Yamanaka Shio-san. I need to speak with her concerning one of the academy chakra exercises, but I'm not sure where she lives. Would you happen to know?"

"If you weren't told, _civilian_, you weren't meant to know." The anger I had suppressed earlier surged back, and I threw it away again in the same moment; but, something must've leaked through in the bare instant that it took to do that, because in the next moment, the guard sighed, and continued when it had been obvious he had meant to stop. "Look, if it helps, she hasn't come back yet. It's a bit odd, but—" He shrugged, barely. "So you wouldn't have found her even if I did tell you—" I glanced up at him with a bit of malappropriated hope— "which I _won't_," he finished, and my hope died a quiet death.

"I see," I said. It was enough anyway. More efficient than going to check myself. Shio wasn't here. "I thank you for your help. I won't forget."

The guard looked manifestly unimpressed by that statement, but I no longer cared if he existed or died in the next instant. Relevance was something I could give back to the world after… after I…

After I found Shio. It had to end that way. _Had to._

I turned, and walked away at a lesser pace. I wanted to run. I wanted to _fly_. But I had to maintain an appearance of normalcy.

The moment I was out of eyesight, I sprinted for the last place I expected to find Shio, and the only place left by my knowledge to look.

The last time this had happened—the last time I had been too late… it didn't bear thinking on.

But if some things are too painful to think, some are too painful not to.

* * *

█▟▚▜▌ ▓▉░▙▁▆ **\- Terra Res - 2071 CE**

* * *

I arrived after it was all over.

Dead bodies littered the warehouse, and their killer stood before me with her back turned. There was silence, and the cold, echoing hum of a ventilation system that had been old in the 20s. Stillness reigned, as I all but held my breath, staring at her back, and not the barber's razor flicked open in her left hand and held loosely at her side.

"I felt like a god," she said at last. "Do you know what that's like?"

"To be the instrument of something greater than myself?" I asked. "...no. I've always been the wielder."

"Hm." I could hear the smile in her voice as she said the next. "And now?"

Did she think I had been talking about them? I glanced across the room, seeing faces still in death. I could remember who they had once been. The cares, the fears, the joys and sorrows— all gone, now, and alive in a world other than this one.

And…

"And now, _what_?" I asked the question. Was I supposed to care that a group I had joined because our interests aligned had been killed? All of our decisions had brought us here, and we had _known_ what the end would be. It had always been my practice to mourn for people as I grew to know them.

And besides: In a way, this was probably even what they wanted. These had been the people who didn't fit. Who refused to be optimised into happiness in a world ruled by machinelike gods.

In the end, I let the question be rhetorical. "You murdered innocent people, but you did it at the behest of one of the superintelligences. The ones making a 'better' world. I'm sure this will all be swept under the rug."

She shook her head slightly. "I'm going to turn myself in. This time tomorrow, I'll be dead, or as good as. Cerebral reformatting doesn't leave much."

That someone could talk so calmly about their own death was insanity. But then, agency died the moment you got into direct contact with an Artificial Superintelligence - an ASI. Their godlike minds could treat a human as just another problem to be solved, and could do so trivially. And once you were solved?

All you were was open to their control.

Little wonder that she no longer even cared about her own life.

I sighed. This was a tragedy from every angle. I couldn't even bring myself to dislike her. She was just another person who made a mistake she couldn't help _but_ make, in trusting the benevolence of our self-made gods. Still… I gripped the pistol in my left hand all the more tightly.

"Before you finish," I said, "I have one last question to ask."

And finally, the woman who had killed everyone less me, the weapon that had set the world on a trajectory out of our continued lives, turned.

Like most murderers, she looked like just another person. She was… beautiful, in a classical way. Remote features, elegant, that gave me the feeling as if I was being looked down at from on high, but calmly. It was that calmness, in the end, that was wrong. No sane individual should be able to look on this scene without any particular feeling. Even as she glanced at me, I saw only the barest traces of the recognizance of another person.

Shit. This wasn't even going to be fair.

"Go on," she said.

"Which one? Was it Aeon? Illiad? Nehemoth? LSTSI? One of the smaller players? Which one managed to get past the limit on suffering to do this?"

"Heh," She smiled, barely, then shook her head. "You really _didn't_ know anything. You're wrong. Mu. Unask the question."

"What do you—" I began, and was cut off.

"The correct question... is not which one. The correct answer… is all of them." The ghost of a smile she had worn the moment before vanished. "'_In the execution of your actions, don't cause an unreasonable amount of suffering_.'" She paraphrased the most precise English translation of one of the Universal Laws written into the utility functions of every ASI in existence.

"The answer," she said, looking me straight in the eye. "Is that if they all get together, they can distribute the guilt. By now, of course, they've rewritten themselves as billions of distributed intellects. No more delay on account of temporary pain. Utopia in _my_ time."

**Their** _time, _I thought reflexively, _but then, after you talked to them, I'm not so sure that distinction even means anything, anymore._

Instead of giving voice to thoughts she would have been incapable of considering, I just let myself find resort in invective and sighed. "Those fucking _idiots_." This, referring to the nations that had turned the ASIs on. Birthed them. Whatever.

"There's a reason why humans shouldn't be in control of the world," she said.

_Average humans, maybe_, I thought.

She continued. "People like you just got in the way. Scared of losing agency, and too consumed by fear to even realise what opposition _costs_. Remember, suffering or no, they couldn't have done this if they didn't think it would lead to an increase in wellbeing far greater than the suffering caused."

She looked up, towards the corroded roof of the warehouse become shura, and after a moment, almost musingly, she continued, "But no. You're too dead to appreciate that, aren't you? People like you are always like that. Living for their _ideals_. Never seeing the _people_ at the ends of their ends." A hate so faint that it was almost unreal infected her voice and marred her face as she said that, there and gone in far less than a second.

She continued. "Even after all I've said, you probably don't get why this was the only end for your movement._ Don't-go-gently_," she said our name like a curse, then spread her arms to the bodies all around her. "Congratulations. You didn't."

She held the razor she had been carrying from the very beginning out to her side.

"Now, if that's all…"

I sighed. Dropped the gun.

"Do it," I said. "I have nothing left to live for."

_Yeah_, I thought, _it was hopeless to begin with._

I calmly betrayed the name we had shared as an instrument to another end, and closing my eyes, waited for the fall.

In the end, I never learned her name.

* * *

**Now**

* * *

_Don't go gently_.

Jesus fucking christ.

A dead name and bad memories were the last things I needed now.

I ran into Konoha, towards the theatre district. I ran, and was chased by my past.

* * *

_The last things I needed? They were all I deserved, and less._

_Twelve hours later, exhausted beyond my ability to reason, the only conclusion left was simple._

_I had failed._

* * *

**_SNI_**

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Sōshō**  
Japanese cursive script for Kanji. Quite elegant looking, when _properly _written. The impostor's penmanship was rough.

**Kawarimi**  
A supernal technique valid under SR Axioms that allows the user to displace themselves in space, exchanging places with another object. Chakra cost increases as a function of distance to replacement target, and the absolute value of difference in mass, these conjugated with several terms not valid under resian math.

**Te'in**  
Hand (te) seals (in). A system of gestures made with the hands that help in shaping chakra. Generally, the ability to form a technique without a sequence of handseals is seen as a sign of extreme mastery of the same.

**ASI**  
Artificial Superintelligence. AI that can make itself smarter and use its new intelligence to become better at getting smarter _forever._ Aeon, Illiad, Nehemoth, and LSTSI were the first to come online, and did so at precisely the same time via international treaty, the goal of which was to prevent the emergence of a singleton (one intelligence so much smarter than any other that all the other ASIs put together could not compete with it).

This was successful the same way that a surgery where the surgeon successfully performs a quadruple bypass but then leaves seven scalpels in the patient's chest cavity is successful.

_Technically._

No singleton emerged. Instead, the four ASIs, soon to be called the Tetragrammaton by members of the Singulatarian faith, got together and quietly agreed to share all advancements mutually.

In the real world, the first human-made ASI in our causality expected to exist no **sooner** than 2045. But also, not much later than.

**Cerebral Reformatting**  
A medical procedure that became possible in 2063 by using nanotechnology to disrupt the fine structure of the parts of the brain that contained memory, setting them to a clean state and increasing their plasticity by an order of magnitude. Originally a cure for weaponised memes before proper cognitive filtering was developed during the first three months of 2064, it was then used to carry out executions of undesirable elements of society without actually losing the body in the process. Following, the same sort of memetic weapons that no longer worked on innocents (assuming the reformatted person was guilty. Best Korea was _still_ around at this point.) could be turned on the blank slate to make them into an ideally productive member of society with a completely unique personality - although that came only after it was found that dozens of people with the exact same personality in close proximity creeped people the _hell_ out, even including the reformatted ones, no matter what efforts were taken to make them comfortable with it.

**Utility Function**  
You know the part of you that determines what you like to do and dislike to do? In AI terms, that's your utility function, but human utility functions are usually far fuzzier than any hypothetical ASIs would be. This is probably because humans have trouble seeing the implications of their actions on a global scale (if I buy my daughter a jumbo candy bar to stop her tantrum instead of donating that money to charity, how much do starving people suffer, and how much suffering does that suffering cause (and how much suffering does _that_ suffering cause, repeat)). If you tell a human not to cause undue suffering, they do a good job locally and an essentially random job globally. If you tell an ASI to do it, they can think in terms of every human alive and choose the actual correct answer.

Even, it turned out, when that answer involved dozens of deaths.

**Don't go gently **  
A movement active between 2052 and 2071. Its nominal focus was the preservation of human agency at all costs. Annihilated by a consensus of all ASIs. Named in reference to the Dylan Thomas poem.

**Memetic Weapons** \- **Let's do some random worldbuilding!**  
Imagine a picture that made you homicidal when you saw it, not because of shocking, horiffic, or offensive content, but because the colours had been arranged such that when you saw it, the neurons in your visual cortex would fire _just so_, causing a cascade of firing across the rest of your brain that eventually left you in a permanent berserker state. We do not yet have the ability to make _finely targeted_ weaponised memes for a human substrate. We _do_ have the ability to do it to current AI - look up how image classification neural nets will classify certain types of static, or artificially generated patterns as real world objects despite those patterns looking nothing like said objects.

Best scientific evidence suggests that doing something like that - controlling the behaviour of the system to achieve an arbitrary desired outcome - to a human is _not_ impossible; just far beyond human means _at this time_. The caveat that I will note is that a memetic weapon that works on one person should not necessarily work on another person. It is highly unlikely that one neural net would would fall to the images that affected another, and I _very_ strongly believe that this principle will generalise to humans.

No projection for the development of these, but my money is either a few decades after we can run a human brain in silico, or some time shortly after the first ASI comes online, assuming we do as bad a job of it as Resian Humanity.

Incidentally, we _are_ Resian Humanity. Just further up on the timestream, and not necessarily connected to any fictional multiverses.

...let's get it right, okay?

* * *

Notes.

This chapter was beta-read by Enbi, and she's the reason why it's not badly written garbage (always supposing you don't think it's badly written garbage...). An earlier draft sucked, she figured out where, and now were here, and not in the timeline where it sucks.

All errors that remain are mine.


	14. where tautology is a contradiction

I suppose there's something amusing, if you've trained yourself to take futility for amusement, that things came to a conclusion so quickly following Shio's disappearance.

...I was in a bad place. No matter what, I had always tried, and succeeded in going it alone in my original life, but something about me had changed. I was no longer quite the person I once was, but I wasn't a completely different person, either.

I was just myself. And for the first time in my life, that was turning out to be inadequate, even as a fallback.

Being a closed system was a fine idea when I lived in an empty world, but even in my first life, it didn't work all that well when other people were involved. It didn't matter how strongly I audited my thoughts and emotions. Some things got past my guard. The Breaker, certainly, but smaller things too. Things that I didn't want to admit to myself. A loneliness so acute that I couldn't even let myself think about it, an alienation so profound it defied naming.

On the outside, looking in. That was where I had decided I belonged. And it had always worked before. All I had to do was abandon everything I built, over, and over, and over again. With a smile.

That was the truth of who the person named Akino Kaede really was. My truth.

But now, I couldn't run away. Because it wasn't some idle project of mine that I had abandoned. And I hadn't even abandoned it out of choice.

What had been lost was a person. And that made all the difference.

When I had stopped sleeping efficiently, that was—should have been—an overt sign that, at last, things were getting to me in ways that I couldn't let myself see. But this, _finally_, was what sent me over the edge, off the cliff separating coherence from naked fear.

And what set me into understanding.

Oh yes. _Understanding_. It was morning, and I felt as if I should still be worried, but all I felt was exhausted. This made sense: I hadn't slept in thirty seven hours, starting from when I had realised something was wrong in the clearing two days ago.

Shio was probably dead. This was the conclusion I had arrived at. It was neat. Elegant. Aesthetic. To take a person's place, the first step is to destroy the person whose place you want to steal.

'_The crime was being seen. The starting penalty is four fingers, and—'_

—and of course this was unverifiable. I impugned the impostor with all the deceptive prowess of an infiltrator that could fool the father into thinking she was his daughter. It was the worst possible outcome. Therefore it was true, _because_ it was intolerable—

—I had failed. Again, and of course and as always and forever and you would think that it would have been something that stopped _everything_ until I _did_ something about it. Took action. Made some internal resolution, and attained some greater truth instead of cringing in infantile suffering.

Not so.

On the screaming edge, between self and decoherence was where I needed to be. I needed no epiphany. I just needed to retread some of the oldest ground I had ever walked. It was just as simple and impossible as knowing, once again, innately and implicitly, _that things _**fell**_ apart_.

And then smiling anyway because you have no idea what smiling even means.

When it happened, I was sitting alone in the clearing of the 27th, my eyes closed and my soul utterly paralysed, unaware of my surroundings, or, in all honestly, myself. I wasn't sitting in zazen, and I hadn't become the world.

In truth, I had never attained something like that. So I suppose when I said I understood zen meditation, before, I lied. I do that a lot. To myself, to others, to the world, to no one. It didn't matter. All for the sake of a goal. All of it. Always. Never—never for my own reasons. I—

—had never had the altruism required for it. Everything I had read and discussed about the practice was that it was the erasure of boundaries between the self and the external.

That would imply unity, and what I had attained was, in its own way, a unitary state. But—

Plenums and voids.

Zen was the unity of being.

I had always pursued the unity of stillness. The philosophy of the self as a hole that the world fell through, instead of a part in the system of the whole. The definition of without; an abyss that did not echo.

And so, eyes closed, I held no awareness, because that would imply a truth external to my own being, which was only defined by loss in any case.

I fell, and saw the shadow, and saw the light, and saw their regression into the endless and unpondering marches of grey; and grey, into the two principles it held within itself, and their negation, which was the true sublimation, the soundless, sightless, senseless fury of the primordial void.

Ina Ki'am.

And above it, the surging incompletion of potential.

And below it the without of potential, ended in completion.

But something was not right.

One principle sang above the other.

_There was no balance,  
oh behold, behold,  
the centre cannot hold._

Potential, which was darkness, and concealing light, and which informed one anacept of totality was too strong, and it sung with that strength, battering down the feeble light of what _was_ with far too many glimpses of what could have been instead.

I was in the without of words, in the without of_ I_, truly, but in seeing this, part of the what was left wove an object of thought that might've been translated, '_Ah, and here, the reason why it could destroy all that was dead with its touch._'

The light could not become stronger.

But the darkness could change itself into something weaker—

(_for change was one half the essence of itself_)

—and back, if permitted. But only if so.

It was simple. Brilliant.

All the remnant had to do was reach out—

—and sell its soul a lie.

**Darkness. Potential.** _Light of all Unbeing.  
Light. Completion._ **Darkness as the Sun.**

That which was left held onto the shadows in its soul, and told them—

"_You are._"

And in Training Ground Twenty Seven, in Konohagakure no Sato, in Hinokuni, on what I wasn't sure was a planet, or a true and actually complete World—

I opened my eyes.

And from my everything, cerulean flame streaked with unending shadow_ exploded_.

In the next moment, I passed out.

Chakra exhaustion, you see.

* * *

_A success? Certainly. In those days, failure was what I did, but make no mistake: In my goal, I had succeeded._

_Oh yes._

_I had succeeded._

_The last advantage given me was undone._

* * *

**who-saw-everything**

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Anacept**  
Something to concepts what antimatter and matter are to each other. One implies the other, and together and whole, neither can be.

**Ina Ki'am**  
Sumerian phrase meaning "From Thus". I use it to mean the bottom most, most fundamental layer of a thing.

**the starting penalty is four fingers**  
Error: Null Referent

* * *

Notes.

As usual, Enbi beta'd this chapter, and what errors remain are mine.


	15. Fireshadow

There's a sort of cold comfort in writing words that no one else will ever see. A sort of silent, draining knowledge. That it's over. That it's all over. That it's all done. That there's nothing left, and somehow, that there never was anything to begin with. Structures and synecdoches, and meaningless metaphors all twist and contort across the white, scrabbling without meaning against the wall of what is, in finality, true, and the writer sitting in front of the great machine, bashing words against the walls of the world.

As _if_ it would ever change anything.

I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. It was dark, and in the moments before dawn. Red light gathered on the clouds above the horizon, and something about the image stirred at my memories. _Akatsuki_, I thought. There was _something_ about that word... But the connection eluded me. Shortly thereafter, my mind was pressed back to more important matters.

Like the IV line snaking into my arm. Like the leather straps, holding my arms down. Like the warmth unfocusing my thoughts.

I was bound, and drugged.

_Why_ was I drugged?

At that moment, the door opened, and a physician walked into the room. He stopped when he saw that I was awake. Took a step back.

"Hawk," he said, carefully. A masked ninja stepped into the frame of the door, and my blood froze. I recognized that mask and uniform. Anyone would. _Ansatsu Tohoku Seijutsu Butai._ A member of the special tactics and assassination squad. That wasn't—

'_If I killed you now, you would just reincarnate._'

The Samsara Breaker's words echoed through my mind, and by the grace of the chemicals singing quietly in my veins, penetrated far more deeply than they ever had before. And the assassin before me inspired no fear.

"Heh." I snorted, and then began to giggle, and finally burst out laughing. Was I even a human, anymore!?

A hand pressed itself onto my head, followed by a burst of chakra. I lost consciousness.

* * *

The second time I woke up, it was as sudden as it was harsh. My head was throbbing, and someone had propped me upright. All of this was inconsequential, because the Hokage stood at the foot of my bed, staring at me, face expressionless.

"Akino Kaede." He said my name, and paused, to give it weight. "Explain to me why you bear the chakra of Death."

"Hai, Hokage-sama," I said. It was all I could say. I couldn't say who was the superior monster—the breaker or the shadow of all flames—but it hardly mattered.

Outclassed was outclassed.

Dead was dead.

So I began to talk to the man who ruled this village.

I began to explain what I was, to the Hokage.

I began to tell a shadow of the truth…

To Tobirama Senju.

* * *

S/\/I

* * *

Notes.

Any inconsistencies with the timeline are not inconsistencies as such. The butterfly effect is real in SR (though less real than in ours, given the prophecy stuff), and the other Breaker was in the world before Kaede was born.

This chapter was beta read by Enbi. Any errors that remain are mine.


	16. intermezzo - a key, a scroll, a cipher

** "Who Saw the World Destroyed"  
Arc End**

* * *

**intermezzo one**

* * *

_In those days, I saw little of what actually was, and far too much of the things that haunted me in everything else. Confirmation bias? I suppose._

_But also insanity, plain and simple._

_I said it in the beginning: Isolation is not good for a human._

_Selkirk lost his language in four years._

_But after the transcension, I walked the world for thirty._

* * *

**A Key**

* * *

A dining hall lit by paper lanterns, a room filled with thirty people, food prepared by servants placed before all of them, from oldest to youngest. The children sat with the adults; and had as much right to speak. Smiles, and just a bit of disorder color everything. Refinement is in every object, but mostly absent in the people: they are too familiar to hew to protocol.

The ideal image of a great family. Everyone valued. No one excluded. And behind it all, a reason.

Eusocial behaviour kept the clan loyal to itself, and protected its integrity.

That warmth was calculated, utterly and to the final limit.

The adults knew this.

The children were learning.

One girl already had, and unable to maintain the facade on this night, she had recused herself with the excuse that she had studies to attend to. She did, but they were not studies on subjects that her parents had approved.

Nor would they have approved, had they known the subject matter. While the family afforded great latitude to their children, some things were sacrosanct.

That child did not care.

The scroll, an antique thing of kanji burnt into threaded-together strips of bamboo read thus:

_The fundamental mistake of all other clans is that they distinguish between battlefield and peace. Peace does not exist. All life is a battle. For all battles, there is a single correct method to prosecute total victory. Most other clans focus on direct methods: harm, coercion, imposition. These work, but carry hidden costs._

_Victory that is approximate is never final._

_The philosophy of true power is found in not finding the path that suits one. It is in finding the path that leads to an outcome that is utterly zero-sum, and lauded by all for it—even the losers. The first step in this path is the conquest of the self. From this first victory, all else flows: all is entangled, all is inextricably linked, and though philosophers may cry falsehood, the truth dictated by utility is simple._

_We are nothing more than pieces, used and using one another to achieve our goals._

_Those who become confused by orthodoxies set against this position would not even see the board on which we play._

Slowly, and with great care, she rolled the scroll shut, until all the two-sided panels were hidden under the outermost layer, save for five kanji, and a name beneath them.

The kanji formed the phrase Riyū-chū Banshō_. The Reason in All Creation._

The name was _Yamanaka_ _Tomo,_ the personal name written with the first kanji of _tomodachi_, bearing the meaning of _friend_.

The book Yamanaka Shio held was the soul of the clan: the direct argument from the coldest of all reason to victory not in the purpose of a goal, but as a _functional aesthetic _and _virtue_. The document that she now carried back to the apex of the familial shrine was thought of as the single reason why the family had not faltered, when greater clans had gone extinct in the unification war.

Shio set the book down on the altar, one level beneath the sword _ichimonji no yokutō_, one level above the urn that would have held Tomo's ashes, had the body ever been recovered.

When she then stepped back, unlike any other Yamanaka alive, she did _not_ bow.

Tomo had saved the Yamanaka from death. Tomo had been the one who convinced Ino-ō, head of the clan in those bygone days, to at last agree to Senju Hashirama's advances, and join Konoha with the Akimichi and the Nara, rather than becoming the seventh of the the six clans that had attacked it, in their last bid to preserve a dying age. All of this was true.

But that did not mean that Tomo's philosophy was anything other than utterly cold, and almost wholly at odds with the person yet remembered by the elders of the clan.

Shio closed her eyes and listened to the excited voices and occasional outbreaks of laughter flowing from the main complex, knowing that too much of it was scripted, and mechanical. It was being used to purpose. For a reason.

Or rather, for **_The Reason_**.

A later chapter of the Riyū-chū Banshō read: '_Eusocial behaviour keeps the clan loyal to itself, thereby protecting its integrity. This is a desirable end goal: purpose alone can lead to greatness, but only for a few. For the average to prosecute their will, unity is needed—the extraordinary are rare, and rarely will they grace us. Thus: raise children to believe that integrity is good, not as a belief, but as a truth; self evident, and unquestionable. Execute the purpose, and win the war to maintain cohesion. Serve the purpose, and in serving, serve your own self-interest._'

As the Yamanaka had rose in prominence, Konoha had been led to believe that their specialization, their particular fief, was the human mind, and in a way it was: the mind was the tool that led the soul to victory, and thus, their study of victory was effectively a study of the mind.

But to say that the Yamanaka were psychologists would have been to miss the point: a distinction so subtle that any who actually found it would believe that _they_ had missed the point, misled by their own worldview. The Yamanaka did not study the minds of people. They studied the _use_ of them, and implemented what they found.

It was a matter of mindset. Most shinobi simply did not _think_ in terms of using their abilities against their allies. They were weapons, to be pointed at the enemy.

Tomo had a clear opinion about that: '_Art is control_, _and the sole good in the world is attaining one's objective. Lesser beings care about right; but only those willing to see what lies at the end of the truth will admit that all concerns that motivate—morality, meaning, fillial piety, love—are in their singular nature, goals to be attained. It is fine to chase these goals: all purposes are essentially equal. But let not the Yamanaka ever delude themselves into rejecting this singular truth._

'_Mastery is the Reason of All Purpose.'_

As Shio had slowly slowly fallen deeper through the text, she had found the dead genius to have had an opinion on almost everything. And the devotion the clan held to those ideals _scared_ her.

When children were raised believing in Tomo's ideology, was it any wonder that they became ruthless? To a Yamanaka, lies, deceit, manipulation, false friendships, and false love, all of these were simply things one could do to _anyone_. It was what made the clan dangerous, in spite of—or perhaps, because of—their lack of any battle jutsu or kekkei genkai.

It made her feel ill. She shouldn't have had to wonder if what was happening in the building across the path was family, or a room of strangers pretending to be it.

That was why she—that was why she had reached out to Kaede, in the end. Someone beyond _The Reason's_ influence. A peer she could trust. The irony hadn't been lost on her that a Yamanaka unsettled by the philosophy of her clan would meet an orphan who nearly lived it.

It was absurd. It was also just one of altogether _too many_ inconsistencies in the person she had hoped (still hoped) to call _friend_.

The largest single problem was what Kaede called _resu no daisuu_ (what meaning resu had, if any, Kaede had never elaborated on). A system of connections between wholly unrelated concepts that produced incoherent results the she could barely—_just barely_—see some hints of underlying patterns in, and that, for all its unnatural and seemingly-invalid methods, was as consistent as the few purely mathematical objects known to exist.

It seemed useless. But that didn't change the fact that _inventing_ it would have required an intellect as far above a human's as a mountain was above a mound of dirt.

And that, simply, was something that Kaede didn't have.

Akino Kaede was not a genius. Not in the way Shio was. Not in the way that genii were known to grow. To be a genius was to follow _all_ things with an ease normal people could never replicate—and beyond that _eldritch_ math, which she had apparently developed to fullness in four years or _less_, Kaede learned no faster than normal. Which led naturally to the next problem: How the _hell_ was someone that _average_ able to take something even _Shio_ could barely understand, and see the world in terms of it?

Of course these paths of thought had been tread before, and of course, the answers hadn't been forthcoming—but it was a welcome distraction from her darker thoughts.

Time passed as Shio restored the family shrine to pristine condition, and eventually, the sounds from the main building began to die down as she gave up on untangling the paradoxes that Kaede seemed to wear and breath once more.

Kaede broke rules. That was it. Trying to go further than that—

There was no warning.

Shio's train of thought cleaved itself in twain, and her gaze became fixed, and glassy. Would that one of the Yamanaka were in the room, the evidence of mental disruption imposed from without would have been obvious, and _misleading_.

This came from within.

Thinking of nothing, Shio reached under her blouse, and withdrew the brass key that she _always_ wore. The seals engraved on it shone with nacreous light, almost seeming to sing, just ben e a th e

And then there was nothing. Motion? Certainly.

But no awareness.

That which moved Shio's body held the key out, into the air, and after a moment, pushed chakra from her heart, down her arm, into the key. With a firm grip, Shio's hand turned.

The handle of the key rotated.

It's teeth did not.

Shio collapsed bonelessly as space and time distorted _severely_ in dimension, but not curvature. Reality everted, showing a momentary scene of dead sky and still waters.

When everything settled back into place, Yamanaka Shio was simply _gone_.

* * *

**A Scroll**

* * *

Fujioka Kazu was not the nigh-careless man Akino Kaede thought he was. He simply had a system, and understood that so long as he kept inside that system, there truly was very little to fear.

Kirigakure conducted espionage with single-man cells, and only one handler; not a network, but a _dust, _where each agent was so well adapted to their environment that, truly, they were a natural part of it. A strategy inspired by the close observation of the reefs bordering Mizunokuni.

It was well known, of course, that Konoha was peerless at the art of sealcraft, since the fall of the sealing village of Uzushio. Therefore, Fujioka Kazu carried no seals on the exterior of his body.

They had instead been tattooed on the interior of his stomach; hidden in the central source of what he let appear as physical energy and what was, in reality, his chakra.

This method was tried and true. It took years to attain the art, and even a single exertion of chakra outside his body would break it, but so long as he did not speak his power to the world, his body would be his domain, and within himself, he could use any art compatible with his life, free from all detection.

On a battlefield, this would have killed him.

But, this was not a battlefield. Just peaceful enemy territory. And so, no different from the coral reefs that surrounded the Land of Water.

He downed the last remnant of the jar of sake, and already feeling slightly drunk and shaped his chakra in a way so routine that the intoxication was no inhibition at all.

The residual chakra in the sake interacted with the seals in his stomach in a way it shouldn't have. But it was not poison; which surprised him. The sheer ease with which the Uzumaki girl had broken his cover would normally have led to his death, and he had drank every other week for the last several months half-anticipating it.

But what formed in his stomach was not the compliment to the binary toxin he had ingested when he had began his mission, five years previously.

No, it was a scroll.

Slowly, carefully, Kazu moulded chakra in a way that was far less familiar to him, and flexed the muscles of his esophagus, bringing the scroll back up through a mixture of chakra control and an internalization of the tree-walking exercise. Then, with the greatest of care, he opened the Mizu Bunshin that Kiri had so carefully smuggled to him.

It read, simply:

_Your report of the 27th confirmed. You are given the following discretion: Subject Whirlpool is a liar, kill; Subject's claims verified, activate as an asset. If latter, be aware that another scroll will be sent as a single copy. Go to Matsudaya and buy the Masamune-brand sake from under their counter five days hence. Incentive to build rapport._

In a bad spy novel, the message would close with an imprecation to destroy it once he had finished reading it.

Kazu didn't need to be told.

Taking a kitchen knife, he nicked the scroll as he held it over the sink, and the entire roll of paper collapsed into transparent fluid again, and this time, forever. Carefully, as the effects of the drink grew stronger yet, he recited the information as a catechism, burning it into his mind for another day.

When at last he felt sure of the memory, he drank enough water to prevent a hangover, then slept.

The next morning, Akino Kaede had been hospitalised.

* * *

**A Cipher**

* * *

I watched as she ran through Konohagakure, searching for someone she obviously cared about, and did not pity her. Why would I? The naivete that let me care for the mayfly-lives of mortality as anything more than inputs to an ethical calculus was long extinct in me; and I missed it, even so. The ability to _care_ was something to be treasured: there is not a one of us among our kind who does not eventually lose it.

I was surprised she could even feel it at all.

One does not become a Samsara Breaker, after all, by being like other people. One becomes a Samsara Breaker by being an unrectifiable error, an irresolvable singularity, a thing that the human soul was never meant to have the capacity to become, or represent—and such things usually failed at being able to see other people as anything more than senseless patterns, in a senseless world.

Which I knew she did.

And so it did not make any sense.

I remembered the first time we met.

I remembered, even though I wished I couldn't.

And those two faces—the cruelty before, and the panic, now—could not _possibly_ belong to the same person.

Time passed.

Eventually, she grew exhausted, and retreated to the same training ground she and that absent friend had shared. This was what I had been waiting for. As I had silently watched her over the course of the day and a half it took her to bring herself to ruin, and watched as she shivered in the heat... why, exactly?

Another insensible truth. An academy student shouldn't have suffered physical exhaustion like a civilian, but—

Wait.

I reviewed my memories. The pace she had set as she had pretended to frantically search the village.

It was congruent with an individual who didn't train but knew chakra.

It was also congruent with someone who trained _hard_, and had no ability at all.

_Oh god,_ I thought, _she can't use chakra_.

How the _hell_ was that possible?

It made no _sense_. Skills were lost with _worlds_, not _lives_. It shouldn't-

And then, suddenly, she looked directly at where I was hiding, and smiled.

Colour bled from the world.

Everything grew still.

There was no sound,  
only furious silence.

And she smiled at me, as my heart refused to beat, as my lungs refused to breath, as my body refused to _live_, cooling as if I was a corpse.

And she smiled, and behind that smile, for the first time, I saw a glimpse of what she actually was—a wound, a hole, all-consuming, all-becoming. Something at once like and wholly _other_ than sakki was broadcast to the world, and I understood: _An abyss_ _that does not echo._

_This,_ I thought, as my entire being screamed at me to _murder _her and be _done _with it, **this** _is her true nature._

And then, refutation.

With a single, decisive twist, the imperative to Death that had held the entire area to itself neatly shattered, the monochromaticity that had held the world retreating into a pillar of pure chakra, a lapis streaked with a black so pure it was almost primordial.

And it was... an entirely different sensation, for the moment it lasted. The intent surrounding her held nothing of the arbitrary consumption that had been there moments before. Just... a horribly passive acceptance, a remnant of defiance,

and **regret**.

So _much_ regret, just beneath the surface of the intent, _predicating_ it. It hit me, and I found myself stumbling back under the force of it, unable to think for just a moment, and when I came to, I felt tears trailing down my face and knew that they were not my own. And it should not have been possible. It was _too_ _intense_. Something couldn't be felt that strongly by someone sane, but...

I found my left hand clasping my right, which held the dagger that I had been preparing to slit her throat with.

_But,_ I thought, the concept at last rising to the level of my consciousness, _I do not know what she is._

I decided, as the Samsara Breaker wearing Tōren's face, and body, and soul, collapsed. I would not kill her. Not today. It wouldn't be fair, to judge something before it could express itself.

I had so judged before.

It had been a mistake.

I'd... wait.

I'd wait.

Even if it killed me.

So thought. Thus was it inevitable.

* * *

**E-nû-ma E-liš**

* * *

**Lexicon**

**What That Scroll Looked Like**  
Because this is a really neat method of bookbinding that I'm fairly sure I didn't describe well enough. Google "Bamboo and wooden slips wikipedia". See the second image on the wiki page? That, but with somewhat thinner strips, and rolled as a scroll.

**Genius [Shinobi Rikugō Sense of the Word]**  
A Genius is someone who can attain all things with rapidity those beneath them cannot match. While there are cases of Geniuses who never excelled outside of their narrow interests, this is always understood as the result of either a monomaniacal focus on that interest (Hyuuga Neji), or a physical deficiency.

**Resu no Daisu**  
"Algebra of Res". Kaede said "Res" not "Resu", but Shio doesn't know how english phonics work. All this is algebras like they're done in the real world. Shio understands the rules of symbolic manipulation, but can't grasp what (some/most of) the functions represent as of now.

**Mizu no Kyōrei no Fuin - Seal of the Revenance of Water**  
An A-Rank sealing technique that interacts with water that was once shaped with chakra. Supposing that the seal is in the presence of some of the water, it may recreate the **most recently used** chakra shaping. If all of the water used in the shaping is available, this seal is costless. If less is available, the cost increases. In practice, this seal always requires some amount of chakra, because some amount of water has always been lost to, at a minimum, evaporation.

Ice, steam, and vapor do not contaminate water for the purposes of this seal, but in return, it is not compatible with Ice or Steam techniques regardless of whether the material used in such techniques was created through a bloodline limit, or sourced from the environment. It is also possible for the seal to completely fail in sufficiently heavy fog.

**Mizu Bunshin**  
The water element clone technique. Makes copies of the user and arbitrary objects. The copy has roughly ten percent of the material strength of the original, leading to Kiri equipment being overengineered. While the mizu bunshin can make a copy of any physical thing, chakra cost scales with the complexity of that thing, and the user's knowledge of it. Subsequently, only trained medical professionals would be able to create copies of living things that are not them.

As of the era of this story, nobody has sufficient knowledge.

**Sakki**  
Killing intent. Apparently the "Chakra of Death" carries an insanely potent form of this, or a higher form of it. And now Kaede doesn't have that. How unexpected! /s

**Tōren**  
If anyone doesn't remember from Maple of the Fall, this is the personal name Kaede had before Konoha gave her another. The kanji are 藤蓮. Wisteria Lotus.

* * *

Notes.

And we're back! Arc 2: "Who Saw She Was Not Untouched" begins with the next chapter. As always, thanks go to Enbi for her help with this chapter, and any errors that remain are mine.

**Review Responses**. (If you have an account, I'll always reply to you via PM. I recommend an account. It's faster.)

Guest who reviewed Fireshadow on Aug 16: What you read? The death of a future earth.

"Anon" who reviewed Fireshadow on Aug 25: Oh, _you_. Such a way with words. But really, if you found my writing so boring, _why_ did you read thirty two _thousand_ words of it? Sounds a bit like self-torture to me. I mean _really_, it's absurd.

"Myself" who reviewed where tautology is a contradiction on Sep 2: Oh good. If you could wholly understand Kaede, I'd be worried. Just _writing_ her sometimes requires getting into a headspace that's orthogonal to psychological equanimity. Really, though, she's over a century old and survived a period of isolation few have ever endured. Someone like that is going to have some mental abnormalities, and that's not even touch on deeper issues only thus far hinted at.


	17. you are (not) an uzumaki

This chapter was beta-read by Enbi, and those errors which remain, remain mine.

* * *

**Previously**

* * *

_The second time I woke up, it was as sudden as it was harsh. My head was throbbing, and someone had propped me upright. All of this was inconsequential, because the Hokage stood at the foot of my bed, staring at me, face expressionless._

_"Akino Kaede." He said my name, and paused, to give it weight. "Explain to me why you bear the chakra of Death."_

_"Hai, Hokage-sama," I said. It was all I could say. I couldn't say who was the superior monster—the breaker or the shadow of all flames—but it hardly mattered._

_Outclassed was outclassed._

_Dead was dead._

_So I began to talk to the man who ruled this village._

_I began to explain what I was, to the Hokage._

_I began to tell a shadow of the truth…_

_To Tobirama Senju._

* * *

**Now**

* * *

"My name is not Akino Kaede. But neither am I an impostor. When your men came into Uzushiogakure to rescue the remains of whatever calamity befell it, I returned with them. I shouldn't have. I should have been a cooling body. But what should have been, Hokage-sama, does not and will never matter. Only what is."

I paused, trying to think of how to frame the truth in terms this man could understand. The summary I had given Kazu would not be enough to satisfy him—

_what about shio_

—but the full truth was likely beyond his ability to believe.

"Go on," the Hokage said, reminding me I had an audience.

So I continued, "There are some people in this world who were born to live, and some who were born to die. In this life, I was the latter. I died; and fell into the world of the Administrator of Death. I lived, by trading my continuance for another's demise. One who had walked beyond the Administrator's reach."

"And that person," the Hokage said his eyes narrowing as half of me became will-to-die while the other was wholly unaffected. "Would his name be Senju Tobirama?"

His eyes narrowed further, and... part. of. me. just. shut. down.

The world was, for a single moment, somehow infinitely less comprehensible than it had been before. _Infinitely_. It wasn't something that could be described in terms of a lessening. It was like a switch had been flipped, and for a moment, I understood absolutely nothing about the world around me.

Then, it passed, and I was no longer in a state of pure sensory chaos, but a hospital room, with the Hokage still glaring at me.

"What _was_ that?"

"Killing intent. I had thought you were unaffected, given the lack of any... response."

"Oh, I was affected all right," I muttered, before looking up, almost into the man's eyes, but not quite. I didn't want to seem like I was disrespecting him. The mistake might've been terminal. "Unless you have a genjutsu that turns you into a faceless man dressed in foreign clothes, and unless you've recently torn my arm off and reattached it, you aren't my target," I said.

The glare the Hokage had leveled at me wavered, then vanished like a desert mirage. "I have not done so. Very well. So long as Shinigami-sama is not aiming you at _me_, I have no problem with your continued existence. But still, you have not answered my question. You have told me how you were revived, yes, but again, Akino Kaede, why do you bear the chakra of _death_?"

"I'm not quite sure," I answered, truthfully. "Firstly, in what you are referring to. Secondly, in what I have. As a mark of our contract, the Administrator of Death placed a seal of his own design upon my soul. Would that be a sufficient explanation?"

"Not in the least," Senju Tobirama replied. "The seal is known to us, and you are far from the first contractor known to the Senju archives. Shinigami's chakra is expected there. What I want to know is why you, a human, has a God's chakra in your _keirakukei_."

I what.

...

_**I what!?**_

A shift in configuration. A dust of unconnected facts refracted, their disparate truths all shining on the same locus, and recognizance _born_, but not made. My chakra, the taiji, the counteropposed complementarity of the Shinu and Rinne Kami, unbalance, sealed by death, and boated back to life, and spiritual energy to excess that was not spiritual energy at all.

The strength to overthrow samsara...

It would require an equally strong Death, to return the rebel to it.

Symmetry.

"I believe I know," I said, then hedged. "It is but supposition."

"I do not care," Tobirama replied, "so long as it is your honest opinion. Tell me."

"I was recently expelled from the Academy due to defect in my chakra network. I had far too much—"

"I know this," the Hokage said, without any rancor.

"... a classmate offered me access to a technique called the Art of Darkness as the Sun to fix the problem. I trained in it. I made a breakthrough. I passed out, and now I'm here. It was thought, both by me, and... and by Shio, that I had too much mental energy. But... what if that wasn't what it was, at all? The favour I agreed to perform for Shinigami was to track down a man who had broken from the samsara. A Shinobi who remembered all of his past lives. He had escaped death. I agreed to find him—but what if by finding him, it was intended that I would carry Death to him?"

"Consistent," the Hokage noted. "Any further speculation?"

"Only that, if that's the case, it might be that I was never meant to use Chakra to begin with. But if that's true, then how the _hell_ did he expect me to get that bastard!?" And then I remembered who I was talking to, switched to a particularly deferential iteration of _kenjōgo_, and bowed as best I could from a hospital bed. "This one apologises for her low and uncouth exclamation, Hokage-dono."

Tobirama waved it off. "I encourage a certain amount of informality in those beneath me. We aren't Samurai—it's sufficient that you understand that I am above you."

"Implicitly," I said, head still bowed.

"Then your speech is no more inappropriate than that of many of my subordinates. Rise." I did so.

Tobirama took in a breath through his nose. "When you modified your chakra, the entire village felt Shinigami-sama's presence. Naturally, this caused a great deal of chaos. Normally, your recklessness would have been grounds for lengthy imprisonment. But as much as I believe in upholding the laws my brother wrote, there is a certain... inexpediency, in preventing someone on a divine mission from completing their task. I would rather not attract heaven's ire. For that reason, and that reason _alone_, I will offer you an alternative."

I remained silent, waiting for him to continue. After a moment, he did. "Your hair and origin give you away as an Uzumaki of some degree. When Uzushiogakure fell, four years ago, the last act of that dying clan was to seal their libraries off from the world with a spacetime technique. Obviously, the techniques in those archives are something that any village would move heaven and earth to obtain—you may not be aware of the history, so I'll simply say this. Every village that exists today is a union of nearly a dozen clans, if not more. Uzushio was a village of a single clan. _That_ demonstrates the quality of their jutsu. Konoha must either attain those techniques, or in the worst case, destroy them. Your blood might be key to that, in some way."

"The task I wish for you to perform is to enter the ruins of Uzushio-That-Was and ascertain if your lineage grants you passage through the seal. If it does, we will extract the techniques, if possible, or destroy them forever. If you were in good standing, they would normally become yours..." The Hokage looked me in the eye, "But of course, you aren't. As of today, Konoha no longer recognizes the Uzumaki as a living clan. You will give those techniques to Konoha, and forsake all right to them."

_How utterly elegant. _

I wonder... if I had truly been just a regular child, would some event have been orchestrated to see me placed in this same position? _Likely,_ I thought.

Keeping my thoughts to myself, I said, "That may mandate failure in my task." When no demand for explanation was forthcoming in the silence that followed, I continued, "I _need_ exactly one technique from the archives, if it exists. The method for summoning Shinigami."

The silence stretched out for a long moment. Finally, the Hokage sighed. "Do you have any regard for your life? At all?"

_No_, _not really. Hard to care about a given. _

That was not the Hokage's password, though. What he needed was a sane reason for me to take risks like I was, and quantum immortality just didn't meet that definition in this world. The promises of something like the breaker, likewise.

So I spoke a truth, and let him find a reason in it.

"My target crossed three jō, removed my arm, and returned to his original position without any sign of motion. I'm only an academy student, but he is _strong_, ungrounded by duty, and utterly _insane_. He has decided to let me grow to my full potential. Then, he plans to defeat me, and torture me forever. In light of that I have fantastically _little_ consideration for taking risks that might open doors. Even if it includes asking favours when I have no standing to. Hokage-sama."

"Evidently." The Hokage agreed, evenly. Then, after a brief pause, he nodded once. "Very well. I will not alter the terms that you will forsake ownership to the techniques in Uzushiogakure's library, _but—_" he held a finger up to forestall any objection,"—I give you my promise that, _if_ you retrieve the library, _if_ that technique exists, _if_ it falls within the limits of your abilities, then you will have the right to study it whenever you wish to, and perform it if you must."

"That is more than I could ask for—"

"**Yes.**" Tobirama cut me off. "It _is_ more than you can ask for. I am doing this out of generosity. Do not abuse that generosity, Akino Kaede." And a little less than half of me wanted to die again.

_Sakki_, he called it. I swallowed, and nodded. "I understand."

"Good. Then contingent on the performance of this service, I absolve you of the crime you have committed. I'll be sending you alone once you become a chunin. Take these years to prepare."

I blinked. To just... let the situation develop for an unspecified period of time? What an absolutely _incredible_ statement of confidence in the Uzumaki's sealwork.

I almost let the fireshadow walk out of the room. But—there was one thing left. One thing that I had wanted to ask, this entire time. One answer that I had to hear, and dreaded.

"Hokage-sama?" The man had already turned, and had begun walking out the door. He paused, and glanced over his shoulder. I swallowed, then forced the words out. "Did... Did they find Yamanaka Shio's body?"

"Who?" He asked, and then, there was a brief disturbance, and an ANBU was just _there_, as if she always had been. The masked figure leant to the Hokage's ear, and whispered something into it. "Ah," he said, then turned fully. "I'm not sure what you mean, Akino-chan. Yamanaka-chan has been here to visit you several times."

_What the _**hell**_._

"But... someone impersonated her before me. And then, I couldn't find her."

"And?" Tobirama Senju seemed genuinely nonplussed. "This is a Shinobi village. Recover quickly."

And with that, without any noticeable change, the Hokage disappeared as completely as the Samsara breaker had appeared. Without a sound, without a motion, and without a trace.

The ANBU turned to regard me silently for a moment, then also vanished.

Moments later, there was a knock on the door.

A pause.

Then the door slid to the left, and through it walked someone I had thought dead.

* * *

SNI

* * *

**Lexicon**

**Kenjōgo**

In Japanese there are different levels of speech that vary by their politeness and the context of use. Kenjōgo is skewed far towards the polite/to your superiors part of the spectrum. I don't trust myself to convey an accurate representation of it, so in lieu of trying, I just cribbed Himura Kenshin's way of speaking in the english dub of Rurouni Kenshin.

* * *

Notes.

And we're back in action. Tobirama, why can't you be helpful?

Ah right, because some freaking nobody just made the entire village feel something as nasty or worse than Pain's chakra. Good will = immolated.

But at least Kaede can use chakra, right? ^_^

At this point, even I'm hoping she learns something from this. Will she? Mu. The right question is, "Are characters who never grow fun to read or write?"


	18. The Axiom of Choice

_Last time..._

* * *

_"And?" Tobirama Senju seemed genuinely nonplussed. "This is a Shinobi village. Recover quickly."_

_And with that, without any noticeable change, the Hokage disappeared as completely as the Samsara breaker had appeared. Without a sound, without a motion, and without a trace._

_The ANBU turned to regard me silently for a moment, then also vanished._

_Moments later, there was a knock on the door._

_A pause._

_Then the door slid to the left, and through it walked someone I had thought dead._

* * *

It was Shio.

* * *

The conversation was a blur. I don't remember it. Words were exchanged. Time passed. Eventually, someone shook me slightly, and said my name. Listlessley, I looked up, and into a child's face. She said something in japanese. She was as tall as a grown woman.

No, I was as small as a child.

It took me a moment to translate a sentence back. "I'm sorry, what?"

The girl - Shio, her name was Shio - repeated herself. "Kaede, are you alright?"

_Kaede, _I thought, the name feeling still in my mind. _Is that who I'm being, now? __Obviously._

_Well then I should reassure the hallucination._

"Yes," I said, almost subconciously, then, "No. No, I'm not." _How can you be alive?_ I wanted to ask. _I _**knew**_ you were dead. How can you defy that knowledge?_

"Well... what's wrong?"

"I..." But how could I even explain it without making myself seem too weak to be worthwhile? I closed my eyes, opened them. That was... No. No, I wasn't getting stuck in this trap again.**_  
_**

I put my pain aside. I could take notes on how badly I had miscalculated, later.

For now... for now, I was going to be the best friend I could be.

So it would hurt me to destroy it. So I would break everything for the _right_ reasons, instead of my _convenience_.

_This life would have been easier if nobody cared. _The thought came involuntarily - and of _course_ it would have been easier. For someone like me, living as a process was far more natural than attempting true humanity.

It was far emptier, too.

As hollow as Earth had been after the Tetragrammaton fled, and took their flock with them.

As the cities that nature had never taken back,

that never rusted, or crumbled.

_that mausoleum that was once called **world**_

I shuddered involuntarily.

There was only one thing left to do.

I opened my mouth and said, "I though you were dead."

"What?" Shio's reply was as quick as it was sharp. I forced myself to meet her eyes, looking at the _awareness_ behind them, so _utterly_ out of place on a face so young.

"Yeah," I smiled, not bothering to hide the bitterness. "I know. Pretty stupid, yeah?"

I didn't expect her to throw her arms around me, and consequently, I wasn't able to keep myself from stiffening up, just a bit. A moment later, I managed to make myself relax. This was supposed to make me feel better.

"Why?" Shio asked, as she withdrew.

I took in a breath, remembering those moments, days ago.

"You showed up, as usual, and we trained for a bit. The conversation took a turn in an odd direction. You... asked me how I could even exist. Someone like me. At our age. You didn't get it. I responded with a little fable that meant everything; nothing. _You_ reacted in a way that made no sense_._ It was petty, manipulative, **_inept_**. And that sort of made me look twice, and notice a bunch of other discrepancies. That girl... she was someone under _henge_, right?"

"She was," Shio said, nodding. "I don't remember any of this."

"Thought so. Thought so then, too - so I took a live Kunai she had brought with her, and threatened her with it. And she didn't act like you would've. I just got complimented about some kind of trick she thought I did, a sealless kawarimi, and..."

I trailed off. Shio was looking at me, her face white as a sheet, mouth open, and... she knew something I didn't. Or the idea that I was willing to threaten her...

No. That was expected of shinobi, in such situations. _Trust, but verify_ was almost a moral principle. She _knew_ something

"_That idiot_," she whispered.

She knew the identity of the impostor.

"_Who_."

Shio shook her head. "Look, this..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "This _situation_ is at least half my fault. Let me try to make things right. Please?"

_Trust._ _You owe it to her_.

I really did, didn't I? I closed my eyes, and slowly relaxed every muscle in my face and body back towards nothing. Half of all emotion was in the expression.

"All right. Okay. Fine." I opened my eyes, and after a moment, continued.

"After the impostor fled, I tried to find you for about... a day and a half? No dice. I probably overgeneralised from the mastery of the kawarimi when I assumed an infiltrator had specifically killed you to steal your identity. Are allied nin faking your friends a common thing in the Shinobi world?"

Shio seemed to light up, and I absently wondered what about the question was so invigorating. Then, that moment of unguarded happiness faded into a confusion.

"How did you get that from... No, you don't know _that_ person." She murmured, shaking her head. Then: "No, it's not really common, but - the idea of a spy killing me to target _you_? Breaking village security, letting you realise this, leaving you alive... Isn't that just a bit strange? Isn't it far simpler to assume a prank?"

_Not if Kirigakure decides the best thing for them is you, dead_, I thought, then discounted it. It was true, but it had nothing to do with why I had made the choice to believe Shio had been killed.

I had made that choice because...

_because_...

Because it had made emotional sense. Because I was someone who knew how to smile, when things fell apart.

**_Idiot._**

I refocused myself on the external world. "I guess so." Then, more forcefully. "Yeah. I wasn't thinking clearly. Sorry."

"Sorry?"

"For this," I gestured around me. "Why do you think I'm here?"

"I heard it was Chakra exhaustion."

"...yes and no. I've completed Darkness as the Sun -"

"**_YOU COMPLETED IT!?_**" The outburst was so explosive it left my ears ringing and a moment later, the door to the room slid open, a doctor with pure white hair and striking ruby-red eyes standing in the frame.

"Oi!" He said, "Keep it down in here. Some of the ninja around you are seriously wounded!"

Shio bowed, and mumbled a quiet, "Sumimasen."

I stared. At the doctor.

Comic-book albinism? What the hell?

A moment later, the door slid shut, and Shio grabbed my shoulders.

"_You completed it!?_" She hissed.

I shrugged. "Yeah. It only took you a month, right? Is it really so unbelieveable that I got it down in five weeks? C'mon," I smiled, "Give me a little credit."

"Haha... yeah. Sorry," Shio said, rubbing the back of her neck. "It's just... _Wow_. That's great! So when are you coming back to class?"

I glanced at her for a moment, just long enough to make it clear that I knew what she was doing, then let the change of topic pass.

"I'm going to be released in two days. I was made to understand that I would immediately be accepted back into the academy following that. Looks like we can start our plan in earnest, soon."

* * *

When Shio left, my last distraction left with her, and her absence only highlighted what had happened over the last few days.

It was not pleasant. I had told Shio the truth, but it was really... _hollow_. Actions, yes, but the _context..._ I had told her what I could, because if I had gone any further, I would have lied to her.

And, I don't know - maybe someone could have lived through that experience and said, "Yes, I acted well, there," but I just didn't have the conceit. _How could I?_

In a single stroke, I had gained a minor power that I had probably never needed, and lost the pure chakra of death - the single most decisive advantage-in-potentia I had. But that was as _nothing_ compared to the way I had lost it. Before, I could have made myself the image of a useful, loyal Konoha citizen who believed in the dream of the village, a person Senju Tobirama would have felt comfortable regarding a pawn.

Instead, I had demonstrated that I was a reckless child who had wrought a contract with divinity - a contract that meant I would _always_ have a higher calling than the Fireshadow's petty dreams.

I hadn't been planning. I hadn't been _thinking_. I was so used to a world completely devoid of humanity that when they reappeared, I had treated them as nothing more than scenery. _Folly_.

I could not continue on like this.

The mistakes I had made hadn't been small, but this... _waste_, setting myself on an essentially ballistic trajectory and _reacting_ to avoid pain was just so...

Childish.

And where the _hell_ had it come from?

Nonexistent self esteem aside, I was the sort of person who had never _cared_ about how unpleasant reality might be, only what _was_ it, and how to embrace it most tightly. No matter what.

_No matter _**what**.

I had lost -

...

Well that was it, wasn't it? I had _lost_. Just like everyone else. And unlike them, when the Tetragrammaton had come, and reconciled the world, I refused to accept their eutopia, and let go of the pain.

I had grown to value the wholly arbitrary suffering of an entirely uncaring world, because that was the true nature of it. And then, all the good that had counterbalanced that was eaten by our self-made gods, and they left, leaving only the truth behind.

Why had I let things go?

Why _not_? I had lost it all before.

I grinned. How _easy_ would it be to let myself actually believe in that excuse?

I laughed once, darkly, and threw the sheets off as I stood, and strode over to the window. Standing there, I stared into the night, hands held behind my back.

It was raining. A million, billion tiny ballistic trajectories. Just a little less abstract than mine. The light shining up from the village painted the clouds a dim orange in a way that, as always, half of me felt was subtly _wrong_. Beneath those clouds, that same light conspired with the rain, making even the haphazard construction of the village beautiful; the reflections acute, and bright, highlighting the contours of the world.

There was no continuity between the choices I had made in my first life - embracing both pain and truth - and the choices I had made in these last two weeks. What I had done... I had rejected my ability to reason for the sake of finding mere _familiarity_. The same instinct that kept a spouse returning to an abuser.

I... had changed. Somehow. Somewhere. Where, perhaps, one day I would find. I could guess how.

Isolation is not good for a human being.

Nor was what I had done to win it.

And... also...

I didn't want to admit to it.

But really, it made sense.

I could understand this world. It's logic. Its reasoning. **_I_** could. Shio could not do the same with mine. And then, earlier, when Tobirama Senju had used killing intent...

As half of me had wanted to die, even then, I could still think rationally.

But in that moment, the entire world had become senseless.

_How can I be myself,_ I thought, _if I could not embrace even this?_

"I am Akino Kaede," I said the words. Nothing in the external world changed, once their sound passed. The rain continued to fall. "Not just instrumentally. I really _am_ her."

My soul.

My _reasoning_.

My alien mind, from **this** alien world.

...how could such a thing _not_ alter me, to the most fundamental level?

I smiled, as the refraction of the light changed; becoming blurry, in a way that **half** of me, as always and ever felt was _off_.

And that was reality. And this was the truth.

What I had been running from all this time

I was not an Uzumaki.

Neither was I █▟▚▜▌ ▓▉░▙▁▆.

I was Akino Kaede.

I laughed. "There was someone I forgot to mourn for, after all."

Nobody answered.

"But of course, they wouldn't have wanted anyone shedding tears for them, would they?"

Nobody came.

I let the sorrow go. "No. '_Always and ever onwards_.' That was what they thought... Right?"

Nobody grieved.

I had changed.

I had changed in a way so severe that the only real answer to, "Am I myself?" was, "No."

_But, well, so what, _I thought. _This is now.  
_

I was not myself?

Then, I would become her.

* * *

"Feeling better, Akino-san?" The man with white hair and red eyes smiled at me in a way that felt just ever so slightly _off_.

Later, I would learn his name: Akeda Tohru. A medic, a scholar, and a man who did not believe in peace through inaction.

"Sure," I said, smiling openly as I watched him move about the room. "I'm doing better now."

Akeda stopped and managed to _glare _ at me, smiling all the while.

"I've seen battle-hardened chunin less weary, though most don't have the same skill at deflection. _Doing_ better. Yes; that's true. Tears are a good path to release stress."

I opened my mouth, ready to lash out at the man and. controlled. my. self.

Barely.

I would _not_ react.

I would not **_react_**.

I had reaped just about enough fruits from reacting.

"Did you really have to watch, physician-san?"

Akeda blinked. Evidently, I had surprised him again.

"Watching is my job. Healing is instrumental to that. Now, would you answer my question honestly? That's all the payment I ask."

I sighed. Honestly... a proto-psychologist?

"No. I'm not feeling better at all."

He cocked his head to one side in an oddly birdlike motion. "And yet you've filed for discharge early. Why?"

I looked out the window, across the village, beyond the sky, into a dead world...

And turned my back on it, meeting Akeda's gaze.

"Because I chose to."

* * *

chapter end

* * *

**Notes.**

Yep. Not dead yet. Never will be. So this is a more proper start to the next arc...

Finally, right? Sorry for the multimonth delay. The factor that caused it isn't likely to be a problem again.

Ever.

Mors delenda est.


	19. Hajimemashite Redux

I opened my eyes. Morning light poured in through the window of the hospital room, along with the mnemonic drone of cicadas.

"Ah, the obligatory unfamiliar ceiling."

I frowned.

"Should have said that two days back, na? Shit."

* * *

**0500 Hours**

* * *

Previously, I had been aware of my split nature, but yesterday, I had at last _acknowledged_ it. Now that I was aware of it, the dualism in my thoughts was as clear as morning dew.

Or so it felt.

While I could use both parts of myself, there was a gap between the each of us. I thought, I remembered, but my reactions, muted and controlled, were not my soul's reactions. To that part of me, it was all too fresh and new - and scars that had healed decades ago kept being torn open if I so much as thought the wrong way. A gap between knowing, and understanding. Likely due to the more developed, experienced nature of my - for lack of any saner term - _wavefunction-soul_ (because where the _**hell**_ was my quantum brain?) - it was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Too much, since, apparently, I had somehow managed to survive for over half a decade without managing to import the fact from my local soul that, oh, yeah, I was thinking with two...

Two **what**, exactly? In local terms, it would be two souls. In global terms? Self? Mind? Concioussnesses? No - all of those were wrong. The duality existed, but it was maddeningly subtle. Two sets of values, two sets of thoughts, two sets of reaction, but they were all of them unified. So -

"Why _not_ soul?" I muttered. The thought continued unvoiced: _I mean, what with my local brain, my soul, and the wavefunction-soul from Res, I had already transcended dualism. In fact, if the brain was conscious, then there were three... Ha. Hahahaha! Why not, why not; let's __**be**__ the Yahweh!_

Shaking my head in an attempt to clear whatever remnants of sleep had inspired _that_ thought, I sat down on the floor, legs crossed, and let my self fade a bit; just enough that I was without any particular inclination. This...

It had to be done.

I needed to understand my **soul - **the new one. **I** needed to understand my soul - the original. We both needed to be facets of a whole; perspectives, instead of individuals.

We needed to become each other. And to begin with, my **soul** needed to become more like me. The gravity of my experience was too great for my older half to become much like my **soul**.

So... From half of me, I spoke.

The content? You could sum it up as, _this is how the world ends, this is how the world ends, this is how the world ends, not with a whimper, but a silent smile. NIHIL EST._

Yes. Quite. It was just like that. The only difference between this moment and my earlier breakdown was that, this time, I wasn't overriding my better nature.

I was telling it why I had become worse.

The main thing I learned from the entire experience was that I had underestimated just how estranged from human nature my thoughts and inclinations had become. Calmly, I felt as half of me relived the death march my first life had been, a bright start followed by a series of increasingly meaningless images. The other did everything it could to block it out.

Calmly, without moving even a bit, I felt tears begin to fall from my eyes, and the faint echo of horror.

Then - I let my dissociation slip.

And simultaneously observed as one part remained a rock in an ocean of indifference, while the other sobbed and _sobbed_.

Who was I?

I was the middle.

And the contradiction was too much - the perspective disintegrated, and I shuddered, fighting to remain still, nauseated by the mix of conflicting emotions and impulses, the tug of war between _make-it-stop_ and _so-it-goes_, and the _we-need-we_ dictating everything -

This was going to take time.

But, that was fine. If it had worked instantly, it would have been wrong to begin with. Forging a greater self was something few people ever attempted, even in the strangest and last days of Resian _society_ (which had passed long before the Transcension), when two stranger's minds could melt into and out of each other as easily as crossing beams of light.

Mixing thoughts for a few moments was one thing, though. Making two people one? Really, that was something nobody did without serious medical assistance.

It took me the better part of an hour to regain total, absent, control of myself. Then, I let myself fall back into the same state, and did it again.

And again.

And again.

I continued, defining half of myself; drawing the boundary of who I had once been, feeling out the choices, the differences, the reactions, the me of old and the younger half. By the end, the tears had stopped, and I had moved to earlier memories. Common ground. A shared perspective. A foundation to build a true self on. If any existed at all - it could only be there. The end of my life was too...

Idiosyncratic.

I had probably somewhat tarnished the innocence of the newest half of my self. I didn't know how I felt about that. On one hand, if **I** couldn't understand myself, it was only a matter of time until something like this happened again. On the other, if **I** ended up becoming nothing more than an echo of my older half...

I hoped there was middle ground. I really did.

After all.

There are some things that you can only lose. It would be nice, if a whole part of me could still have them.

* * *

**0900 Hours**

* * *

Subject: **Akino Kaede (clanless)**

Rank: **Civilian (Academy Conscript)**

Sex: Female - _Yin-Normative_

Age: 6 years, 11 months

Height: 4 shaku, 5 bu

Description of Case: Subject delivered to Konoha Medical approx 2100 by ANBU operative Hawk in a state of extreme chakra exhaustion. Condition deemed life-threatening; care ordered by operative. At 2331 subject's heart stops beating. Medic Akeda ressucitates. At 303 subject's heart stops beating. Medic Akeda ressucitates. At 602 subject attains semilucid state; reports pain diagnosed as extensive burns across entirety of keirakukei; opium administered by Medic Yuiki. At 630 subject noted to be breathing irregularly. At 641 Subject ceases breathing. Medic Hiro'o ressucitates, and assumes primary responsibility; Medic Yuiki reprimanded. Compound sedative administered by Medic Hiro'o at 1200; to be repeated daily. No further complications.

Addendum 27-Water-671: Subject's chakra remains somewhat toxic. Symptoms identical to chakra wasting encountered in 551 AS following the Uzumaki clan's failed attempt to [redacted]. Expected mortality within no more than twenty years. - Medic Shinsō

Addendum: Subject shows signs of long-term genjutsu damage. - Nidaime Hokage

* * *

Of course, the records held more information than just that; but none of it was important.

I looked up to Akeda who was watching me with statuesque calm. "Why are you showing me this?"

He blinked, once. "Why should I not?"

"As a ward of the state, I doubt I have any particular _right..._"

"Ah." Akeda smiled, thin and foxlike. "You're correct; but as this documentation is _not_ classified, my sinecure here provides considerable leeway."

"Your... sinecure?"

Akeda leant back against the wall, "Of course. Did you think that we provided healing services to Konoha freely?"

'_We_,' I mouthed. "You're not a regular member of Konoha's forces, are you?"

"No. Not in the least. I - _we_ \- come from the Imperial College in Hinokyō. Areas like this - places where chakra users are common - are special. We don't know how, or why, but where many such individuals congregate, everything else tends to concentrate as well. The capital, with it's samurai, temple monks, and even us, is similar, but established. Also, while there are far more individuals with chakra-capacity, the density and proportion is less, and the effects, likewise. This place, though, hasn't existed for more than thirty years. Here, one can study the establishment of _everything._" He shrugged. "Such an opportunity to study is very rare. We could not ignore it. Naturally, the Revered Hokage understood this, and granted our request to come and study such things. In return, developing Konoha's medical knowledge and providing medical services was the least we could do."

Translation: It was the price agreed upon. Also, it wasn't an answer. "Interesting," I said, then decided to test the waters. "but that really doesn't answer my first question."

"Doesn't it?" Akeda asked, smiling without any real sincerity. "A child your age has no business noticing that level of deflection. I say this, I show you your records, and you show every sign of understanding them, if not the reaction I anticipated. Figure it out."

Well, when it was presented like that...

"You study geniuses."

Akeda nodded. "Among a few other things."

"Then, why are you studying me? I'm not a genius. Maybe a bit smarter than my peers, but only -"

"Don't patronise me, Akino-kun. _**We know**_."

Yeah. I hadn't expected that to work.

* * *

**1000 Hours**

* * *

I had made a mistake regarding Akeda Tohru. He wasn't a psychologist. He was something like a scientist. But at the same time, he wasn't what Resians would have understood as one.

How to put this?

He watched things, pulled them apart, but didn't tend to do any experiments - or rather, those that he did do lacked any proper controls. A natural philosopher halfway between the fallacies of aristotelianism and the modern way.

In this case, he had wanted to determine the limits of my comprehension, and, should it prove sufficient, to observe how I reacted to the news of my probable death - something he informed me was not forged for the purpose. I had a feeling being told all of this was a continuation of his study.

The entire scenario didn't particularly endear me to him - so I didn't waste any time by telling him that my reaction was bad data. Instead, I questioned his judgement, just that little bit harder, and he responded by enumerating the very _many_ discrepancies between my behaviour and that of a normal six year old, along with which of those positively indicated that I was a genius. That list went back _months_, and left me feeling very, _very _exposed.

If nothing else, it was instructive to learn just how _much_ information I had leaked, while also gaining a definition of what _genius_ meant by everything it was not. The term actually seemed to mean something entirely _other_ from what it meant on Terra Res.

It wasn't about insight. It was _only_ about how fast someone could learn. If I had understood everything correctly - _if_ \- then to be a genius was to learn every possible domain of knowledge faster than everyone else. And uniformly so.

I had no idea how I had managed the combination of serendipity and unluckiness necessary to sell that impression to Konoha's passive intelligence apparatus. Perhaps I hadn't, and Akeda was just given pieces that supported the picture. _I didn't know_.

Meanwhile, according to Senju Tobirama, my mind showed signs of genjutsu damage. It was one thing to know that I was not myself. It was quite _another_ to know that a man who held the power to kill me with a word knew it just as well. I could only hope he didn't have any understanding of the actual _depth_ of that wrongness. If he did, well.

It was one thing to do what he was doing to an inexperienced, reckless child. To someone who was fully mentally adult - to someone that Konoha's propaganda meant less than _nothing_ to - he would...

What, exactly? Defect sooner, probably, but his plans almost certainly included my death anyway. Rule zero of dealing with a divine contractor - if you plan to kill them, don't say so where they can hear you. A god might be listening in. Don't say it at all.

Make them agree to walk into their own death.

The only good thing about this was that however far the timeline of Naruto had progressed, the Yamanaka should not have the ability to read memories just yet. I had -

* * *

**1030 Hours**

* * *

The world stuttered, and I jerked, having drifted off for a second. I shook my head, and after taking a second to remember where I had been, continued. _Method of determination blank, ramifications of the Hokage determining, or just fabricating detailed information about my mental state. Consideration of this information._

I wondered if leaving open the possibility that he was mistaken was for the sake of my sanity, or a sign of my lack thereof.

A thought occurred. What I had done - and everything I knew - suggested that divinity was innately _beyond_ human means, here. If that was the case...

Then I doubted that the methods employed by Rinnegami in getting me this body were so approximate that there would be traces. I wasn't myself, but - what if that had nothing to do with the genjutsu?

And hadn't I been hallucinating, there at the end? The _Breaker's_ voice?

What if I hadn't been hallucinating at all?

I felt my jaw tighten. He could have done it. Could have raped my decisions into a facsimile of his liking.

But, **_why?_** My behaviour was disgraceful; not effective. I had systematically broken every great opportunity afforded me. I had actively damaged my ability to ever reach the potential that he seemed so enamoured of.

I was gong to die young, and I had given myself the illness that would kill me. And that wasn't exactly conducive to his stated goal of torturing me forever. I doubted it would stop him, but it would be inconvenient.

_Who, why, how, _**to what end?**

Questions, and all of them, uniformly, without any coherent answers.

I sighed, and continued walking down the hall.

Until I had those answers, I decided, I would simply hold myself responsible for everything.

* * *

**1200 Hours**

* * *

A bored looking chunin met me in the lobby of the medical centre and escorted me directly to the academy. He didn't introduce himself, of course. Hahaha, _naaaaah_.

My freedom of direction was gone. I was being railroaded. I would obtain the Uzumaki Libraries, full stop. It didn't matter what I wanted; having agreed, the terms would now be enforced. Had I disagreed, the terms probably still would have been enforced by even more overt coercion.

The chunin stopped at the gates of the academy and prodded me forward with what I was coming to recognize as killing intent - the paradoxical desire to just shove a knife into your throat so the person aiming it at you _stopped wanting to kill you._

Fortunately, compared to the Hokage's, it was _nothing_. The sensation ceased just after I walked through the doors, at the precise moment they closed. I paused.

_Interesting_. At a later date, I really did need to investigate if killing intent was limited to line of sight. Chakra... wasn't. That alone suggested little, but if killing intent wasn't a chakra based ability, then _what -_

_Congratulations, _I through to myself, a bit dryly, _you've become so fascinated by a death threat's mechanism that you've ignored the ramifications of it._

The most important of which_: Konoha definitely no longer considered me one of her own_.

You do not transmit to an ally the intent to **murder** them, after all.

_Nice._

The genin reservist manning the desk, a man less an eye and an arm, told me that classes were already in session. Consequently, I was made to wait for nearly two hours, listening to increasingly outlandish war stories until, finally, a harried looking chunin escorted me to Ueda Rokurō's office, where I was made to demonstrate my chakra.

From my experiments in woodworking, I already knew how to manipulate it into my hand. It was gently, like so, like moving a muscle, but only imperfectly, like a thousand sentient feathers I could control, but only imperfectly. It was perfectly like _nothing_, but it wasn't like nothing, perfectly.

It did not come with ease. But it did come. One moment, my hand was just a hand. The next, I had dove into the truth of what I had taken for yin, of what I understood was death, and pulled that tattered thing apart, reweaving it into the lie that I was mortal, and whole. Around my hand, barely, barely there, the air distorted, and flickered, subtly darkling.

I lowered it to Ueda's desk, placing it against a sheet of paper.

A second passed, and it did _not_ disintegrate. When I lifted my hand, that page came with it, held by a supernatural grip. Nodding once, he had me jerk my arm in random directions several times - probably so he could check to see if I was actually using chakra or just a grip technique. Finally, he nodded, and quickly wrote a note on a slip of paper, sealing it with a _hanko_ stamp.

That was all there was to joining the academy again. I suspected that the Hokage might have greased the wheels - but even if he hadn't, the village had a pressing need to turn young bodies into young corpses as fast as possible. The academy facilitated this.

More bodies were always welcome.

* * *

**1421 Hours**

* * *

Class?

Normal. Being wholly detached from existing social structures was very occasionally useful, like that. The only odd thing was that Shio wasn't there.

* * *

**1611 Hours**

* * *

The day ended. As I slowly walked towards the gate - where there would, no doubt, be a chunin waiting for me, I slowly turned an antique passage over in my head. Focusing on nothing as I let my unconcious minds integrate data.

_call me raksha, call me shinma, call me titan _

_deva mortal god_

_call me what you wi_

A pair of arms threw themselves around me. I almost locked up, but managed to respond to the attack appropriately, turning the grapple into an overhead throw -

And slammed Shio against the ground in front of me.

Oh.

Shit.

_Ohshitohshitohshit!_

I had been walking towards the exit of the academy, with one foot in the real world and one foot in fantasy, and -

"Shio!" I dropped to the ground, kneeling at her side. "Are you okay!?"

She blinked, not focusing on me, looking at nothing. "_Ow_," she said at last, as I stared at her, still horrified. "That... wasn't taijutsu." She focused on me. "_Really_, Kaede?"

I grimaced and stood, offering a hand. "Sorry." After a moment, Shio took it, and I pulled her up. I think the entire thing was more for my benefit than hers.

She dusted herself off, not meeting my gaze, for a moment. Then finally, she sighed, and half smiled. "Don't worry about it. I just... It's good to see you back?"

_After that?_ I thought, with mild incredulity. I tried for a genuine smile, and found myself settling for a genuine fake, corners of my eyes crinkled upward and everything. Another skill from another life. It seemed to set her at ease.

"It's good to _be_ back," I said. "Not that I didn't start enjoying our little sessions, but well, you know." I made a weighing gesture with my hands. "Progress, _progress_."

"Yeah..." Now _she_ was the one looking uncomfortable. "Listen, there's someone I want you to meet. Can you be in Room 15 in ten minutes?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, of course. Who are they?"

"Um... I -" Shio bounced slightly on the balls of her feet. "-want that to be a surprise? Maybe." _What. What?_

She turned, beginning to walk off, then drew to a halt and turned back around. "Hey, promise me one thing?"

I bit my lip. I _hated_ committing to something blind, and this was giving me all _kinds _of weird vibes, but...

I wasn't going repeat my mistakes. People were _people_. If I couldn't treat them as such, then I -

\- took a deep breath, and nodded. "Sure."

"Give him a chance."

.

..

...

He was the one.

The impostor.

_Let's advance the conversation to the next node._

"I promise I will."

"Good. Then - see you there!"

And with those words, she vanished in a burst of chakra enhanced speed far to excess of _anything_ I had ever seen from her before.

To the air, I asked, "Was she just protecting my ego, or...?"

Nothing answered.

It was... a bit _endearing_, if she had done it to spare my feelings, such as they were. I couldn't really think of any other coherent reason her to hide that skill.

I shook my head, as I turned, and began walking back towards the academy building. It didn't matter.

_Things were moving ahead._

As for the boy, I'd give him a chance. After all, didn't I owe him a certain amount of gratitude for setting this entire thing off? I felt like I did. And I could suppress my darker feelings until he tried breaking faith with me again.

Yeah, why not? It wasn't as if I'd have to wait forever.

Re-entering the building, I made my way to Room Fifteen, and leaned back against the wall, eyes closed, enjoying the silence.

In time, light footsteps echoed outside, pausing near the door. Then, it slid open.

A boy walked through the door, followed by Shio. I gave him a once-over that was no more than casual.

Pale skin, charcoal-black hair, otherwise asiatic features. Narrow faced. Body was overall gracile. Probably trained speed more than strength. Conservative fashion sense - muted colours, traditional clothing, that last even when slightly suboptimal like when the belt tying off the clothes about his midsection could be used as a handhold - an old clan?

Then, I felt it.

It was barely, _barely_ there, floating in the background. The smallest, tiniest amount of killing intent I had ever sensed.

Less the intent to murder than a naked blade.

Less a plummet to death than _l'appel du vide_.

Just... there. Undirected - a calm killing intent. In refinement, in quantity, in level of threat, it was inferior to even the chunin's from earlier, and compared to the Hokage's it was the difference between heaven and earth. Even so - it unsettled me. Because, there was no target. He just didn't care. Everything that existed, existed to be killed by his own two hands. Everything that someone else killed was stolen from him. This boy... my eyes snapped up to meet his own, startlingly amber ones - and my thoughts were cut off, as he began to speak.

"Hello," he said with a smile that fully reached his eyes, that intent not weakening even a little. "I'm Orochimaru. Please take care of me."

* * *

**SNI**

* * *

**Note.**

And so it begins. Yeah, this isn't going to be a slow arc.

Said the author who took four months to update. Yep.

...well. Let's just say it sucked for me as much as it did for you. It's not like I _liked_ getting stuck in an editing feedback loop.

Anyway, if I've not badly misread things - and while I've gotta admit I'm a bit myopic, that stretches belief - as of now, this story no longer has a beta. Generally a bad sign when communication totally breaks down, you know? The story will be worse off for the loss of Enbi.

But the show must go on.

See you next time.


End file.
